TASE: Task-Aware Speech Enhancement for Wake-Up Word Detection in Voice Assistants

Abstract

Wake-up word spotting in noisy environments is a critical task for an excellent user experience with voice assistants. Unwanted activation of the device is often due to the presence of noises coming from background conversations, TVs, or other domestic appliances. In this work, we propose the use of a speech enhancement convolutional autoencoder, coupled with on-device keyword spotting, aimed at improving the trigger word detection in noisy environments. The end-to-end system learns by optimizing a linear combination of losses: a reconstruction-based loss, both at the log-mel spectrogram and at the waveform level, as well as a specific task loss that accounts for the cross-entropy error reported along the keyword spotting detection. We experiment with several neural network classifiers and report that deeply coupling the speech enhancement together with a wake-up word detector, e.g., by jointly training them, significantly improves the performance in the noisiest conditions. Additionally, we introduce a new publicly available speech database recorded for the Telefónica’s voice assistant, Aura. The OK Aura Wake-up Word Dataset incorporates rich metadata, such as speaker demographics or room conditions, and comprises hard negative examples that were studiously selected to present different levels of phonetic similarity with respect to the trigger words “OK Aura”.