ASRU 2017 2017 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop 16-20 December 2017

Farfield speech recognition has become a popular research area in the past few years, from more research focused activities such as the CHiME Challenges, to the launches of Amazon Echo and Google Home. This talk will describe the research efforts around Google Home. Most multichannel ASR systems commonly separate speech enhancement, including localization, beamforming and postfiltering, from acoustic modeling. In this talk, we will introduce a framework to do multichannel enhancement jointly with acoustic modeling using deep neural networks. Inspired by beamforming, which leverages differences in the fine time structure of the signal at different microphones to filter energy arriving from different directions, we explore modeling the raw time-domain waveform directly.