Device-directed Utterance Detection

Sri Harish Mallidi, Roland Maas, Kyle Goehner, Ariya Rastrow, Spyros Matsoukas and Björn Hoffmeister

Abstract:

In this work, we propose a classifier for distinguishing device-directed queries from background speech in the context of interactions with voice assistants. Applications include rejection of false wake-ups or unintended interactions as well as enabling wake-word free follow-up queries. Consider the example interaction: "Computer, play music", "Computer, reduce the volume". In this interaction, the user needs to repeat the wake-word (Computer) for the second query. To allow for more natural interactions, the device could immediately re-enter listening state after the first query (without wake-word repetition) and accept or reject a potential follow-up as device-directed or background speech. The proposed model consists of two long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks trained on acoustic features and automatic speech recognition (ASR) 1-best hypotheses, respectively. A feed-forward deep neural network (DNN) is then trained to combine the acoustic and 1-best embeddings, derived from the LSTMs, with features from the ASR decoder. Experimental results show that ASR decoder, acoustic embeddings and 1-best embeddings yield an equal-error-rate (EER) of 9.3%, 10.9% and 20.1%, respectively. Combination of the features resulted in a 44% relative improvement and a final EER of 5.2%.

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Cite as: Mallidi, S.H., Maas, R., Goehner, K., Rastrow, A., Matsoukas, S., Hoffmeister, B. (2018) Device-directed Utterance Detection. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 1225-1228, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1531.

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BiBTeX Entry:

@inproceedings{Mallidi2018,
author={Sri Harish Mallidi and Roland Maas and Kyle Goehner and Ariya Rastrow and Spyros Matsoukas and Björn Hoffmeister},
title={Device-directed Utterance Detection},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={1225--1228},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1531},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1531} }