AuthorsPranay Dighe, Saurabh Adya, Nuoyu Li, Srikanth Vishnubhotla, Devang Naik, Adithya Sagar, Ying Ma, Stephen Pulman, Jason D. Williams
Voice-triggered smart assistants often rely on detection of a trigger-phrase before they start listening for the user request. Mitigation of false triggers is an important aspect of building a privacy-centric non-intrusive smart assistant. In this paper, we address the task of false trigger mitigation (FTM) using a novel approach based on analyzing automatic speech recognition (ASR) lattices using graph neural networks (GNN). The proposed approach uses the fact that decoding lattice of a falsely triggered audio exhibits uncertainties in terms of many alternative paths and unexpected words on the lattice arcs as compared to the lattice of a correctly triggered audio. A pure trigger-phrase detector model doesn't fully utilize the intent of the user speech whereas by using the complete decoding lattice of user audio, we can effectively mitigate speech not intended for the smart assistant. We deploy two variants of GNNs in this paper based on 1) graph convolution layers and 2) self-attention mechanism respectively. Our experiments demonstrate that GNNs are highly accurate in FTM task by mitigating ~87% of false triggers at 99% true positive rate (TPR). Furthermore, the proposed models are fast to train and efficient in parameter requirements.
A growing number of consumer devices, including smart speakers, headphones, and watches, use speech as the primary means of user input. As a result, voice trigger detection systems—a mechanism that uses voice recognition technology to control access to a particular device or feature—have become an important component of the user interaction pipeline as they signal the start of an interaction between the user and a device. Since these systems are deployed entirely on-device, several considerations inform their design, like privacy, latency, accuracy, and power consumption.
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