Apple details AI to help voice assistants recognize hotwords and multilingual speakers

Speech recognition is an acute area of interest for Apple, whose cross-platform Siri virtual assistant is used by over 500 million customers worldwide. This past week, the tech giant published a series of preprint research papers investigating techniques to improve voice trigger detection and speaker verification, as well as language identification for multiple speakers. In the first of the papers, a team of Apple researchers propose an AI model trained to perform both the task of automatic speech recognition and speaker recognition. As they explain in the abstract, the commands recognized by speech-based personal assistants are usually prefixed with a trigger phrase (e.g., "Hey, Siri"), and detecting this trigger phrase involves two steps. The AI first must decide whether the phonetic content in the input audio matches that of the trigger phrase (voice trigger detection), and then it must determine whether the speaker's voice matches the voice of a registered user or users (speaker verification).