Speaker recognition with human listeners and with an automatic system were compared. Eight male and eight female speakers were involved. Also the effect of the speech quality was investigated: wide band, telephone band and two signal-to-noise conditions of 6dB and OdB. conditions with noise (SNR +6 dB, 0 dB). For this purpose noise samples were used with a spectrum shaped according to the long-term speech spectrum. The automatic speaker recognition was based on an algorithm which uses a description of the signal by the co-variance in the spectral domain. It was found that for both methods the male speakers are slightly better recognized. One to two words are sufficient, in the wide band condition, for correct subjective recognition. The automatic recognition requires a slightly longer utterance.