multilingual speaker
A comprehensive study of on-device NLP applications -- VQA, automated Form filling, Smart Replies for Linguistic Codeswitching
Recent improvement in large language models, open doors for certain new experiences for on-device applications which were not possible before. In this work, we propose 3 such new experiences in 2 categories. First we discuss experiences which can be powered in screen understanding i.e. understanding whats on user screen namely - (1) visual question answering, and (2) automated form filling based on previous screen. The second category of experience which can be extended are smart replies to support for multilingual speakers with code-switching. Code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages. To the best of our knowledge, this is first such work to propose these tasks and solutions to each of them, to bridge the gap between latest research and real world impact of the research in on-device applications.
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).
Improving Language Identification for Multilingual Speakers
Titus, Andrew, Silovsky, Jan, Chen, Nanxin, Hsiao, Roger, Young, Mary, Ghoshal, Arnab
ABSTRACT Spoken language identification (LID) technologies have improved in recent years from discriminating largely distinct languages to discriminating highly similar languages or even dialects of the same language. One aspect that has been mostly neglected, however, is discrimination of languages for multilingual speakers, despite being a primary target audience of many systems that utilize LID technologies. As we show in this work, LID systems can have a high average accuracy for most combinations of languages while greatly underper-forming for others when accented speech is present. We address this by using coarser-grained targets for the acoustic LID model and integrating its outputs with interaction context signals in a context-aware model to tailor the system to each user. This combined system achieves an average 97% accuracy across all language combinations while improving worst-case accuracy by over 60% relative to our baseline.