Two New Papers Discuss How Alexa Recognizes Sounds : Alexa Blogs

Last year, Amazon announced the beta release of Alexa Guard, a new service that lets customers who are leaving the house instruct their Echo devices to listen for glass breaking or smoke and carbon dioxide alarms going off. At this year's International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, our team is presenting several papers on sound detection. I wrote about one of them a few weeks ago, a new method for doing machine learning with unbalanced data sets. Today I'll briefly discuss two others, both of which, like the first, describe machine learning systems. One paper addresses the problem of media detection, or recognizing when the speech captured by a digital-assistant device comes from a TV or radio rather than a human speaker.