1. A text-independent speaker recognition system comprising: a front end module to: process an audio signal comprising a current sample of natural language speech; identify a speech segment in the current sample of natural language speech; and create a phonetic representation of the speech segment of the current speech sample; and a back end module to: create a current speaker model based on the phonetic representation of the speech segment of the current speech sample, the current speaker model mathematically representing at least one speaker-specific phonemic characteristic of the current speech sample; and compare the current speaker model to a stored speaker model, the stored speaker model mathematically associating phonetic content with one or more other speech samples.