33 research outputs found
Accurate Detection of Wake Word Start and End Using a CNN
Small footprint embedded devices require keyword spotters (KWS) with small
model size and detection latency for enabling voice assistants. Such a keyword
is often referred to as \textit{wake word} as it is used to wake up voice
assistant enabled devices. Together with wake word detection, accurate
estimation of wake word endpoints (start and end) is an important task of KWS.
In this paper, we propose two new methods for detecting the endpoints of wake
words in neural KWS that use single-stage word-level neural networks. Our
results show that the new techniques give superior accuracy for detecting wake
words' endpoints of up to 50 msec standard error versus human annotations, on
par with the conventional Acoustic Model plus HMM forced alignment. To our
knowledge, this is the first study of wake word endpoints detection methods for
single-stage neural KWS.Comment: Proceedings of INTERSPEEC
Deep Spoken Keyword Spotting:An Overview
Spoken keyword spotting (KWS) deals with the identification of keywords in
audio streams and has become a fast-growing technology thanks to the paradigm
shift introduced by deep learning a few years ago. This has allowed the rapid
embedding of deep KWS in a myriad of small electronic devices with different
purposes like the activation of voice assistants. Prospects suggest a sustained
growth in terms of social use of this technology. Thus, it is not surprising
that deep KWS has become a hot research topic among speech scientists, who
constantly look for KWS performance improvement and computational complexity
reduction. This context motivates this paper, in which we conduct a literature
review into deep spoken KWS to assist practitioners and researchers who are
interested in this technology. Specifically, this overview has a comprehensive
nature by covering a thorough analysis of deep KWS systems (which includes
speech features, acoustic modeling and posterior handling), robustness methods,
applications, datasets, evaluation metrics, performance of deep KWS systems and
audio-visual KWS. The analysis performed in this paper allows us to identify a
number of directions for future research, including directions adopted from
automatic speech recognition research and directions that are unique to the
problem of spoken KWS