Large scale machine learning (ML) systems such as the Alexa automatic speech recognition (ASR) system continue to improve with increasing amounts of manually transcribed training data. Instead of scaling manual transcription to impractical levels, we utilize semi-supervised learning (SSL) to learn acoustic models (AM) from the vast firehose of untranscribed audio data. Learning an AM from 1 Million hours of audio presents unique ML and system design challenges. We present the design and evaluation of a highly scalable and resource efficient SSL system for AM. Employing the student/teacher learning paradigm, we focus on the student learning subsystem: a scalable and robust data pipeline that generates features and targets from raw audio, and an efficient model pipeline, including the distributed trainer, that builds a student model. Our evaluations show that, even without extensive hyper-parameter tuning, we obtain relative accuracy improvements in the 10 to 20$\%$ range, with higher gains in noisier conditions. The end-to-end processing time of this SSL system was 12 days, and several components in this system can trivially scale linearly with more compute resources.

This is a report of our lessons learned building acoustic models from 1 Million hours of unlabeled speech, while labeled speech is restricted to 7,000 hours. We employ student/teacher training on unlabeled data, helping scale out target generation in comparison to confidence model based methods, which require a decoder and a confidence model. To optimize storage and to parallelize target generation, we store high valued logits from the teacher model. Introducing the notion of scheduled learning, we interleave learning on unlabeled and labeled data. To scale distributed training across a large number of GPUs, we use BMUF with 64 GPUs, while performing sequence training only on labeled data with gradient threshold compression SGD using 16 GPUs. Our experiments show that extremely large amounts of data are indeed useful; with little hyper-parameter tuning, we obtain relative WER improvements in the 10 to 20% range, with higher gains in noisier conditions.

Accurate on-device keyword spotting (KWS) with low false accept and false reject rate is crucial to customer experience for far-field voice control of conversational agents. It is particularly challenging to maintain low false reject rate in real world conditions where there is (a) ambient noise from external sources such as TV, household appliances, or other speech that is not directed at the device (b) imperfect cancellation of the audio playback from the device, resulting in residual echo, after being processed by the Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) system. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation strategy to improve keyword spotting performance under these challenging conditions. The training set audio is artificially corrupted by mixing in music and TV/movie audio, at different signal to interference ratios. Our results show that we get around 30-45% relative reduction in false reject rates, at a range of false alarm rates, under audio playback from such devices.

We propose a max-pooling based loss function for training Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for small-footprint keyword spotting (KWS), with low CPU, memory, and latency requirements. The max-pooling loss training can be further guided by initializing with a cross-entropy loss trained network. A posterior smoothing based evaluation approach is employed to measure keyword spotting performance. Our experimental results show that LSTM models trained using cross-entropy loss or max-pooling loss outperform a cross-entropy loss trained baseline feed-forward Deep Neural Network (DNN). In addition, max-pooling loss trained LSTM with randomly initialized network performs better compared to cross-entropy loss trained LSTM. Finally, the max-pooling loss trained LSTM initialized with a cross-entropy pre-trained network shows the best performance, which yields $67.6\%$ relative reduction compared to baseline feed-forward DNN in Area Under the Curve (AUC) measure.