A method and apparatus are disclosed for robust, text-independent (and text-dependent) speaker recognition in which identification of a speaker is based on selected spectral information from the speaker's voice. Traditionally, speaker recognition systems (i) render a speech sample in the frequency domain to produce a spectrum, (ii) produce cepstrum coefficients from the spectrum, (iii) produce a codebook from the cepstrum coefficients, and (iv) use the codebook as the feature measure for comparing training speech samples with testing speech samples. The present invention, on the other hand, introduces the important and previously unknown step of truncating the spectrum prior to producing the cepstrum coefficients. Through the use of selected spectra as the feature measure for speaker recognition, the present invention has been shown to yield significant improvements in performance over prior art systems.