Keyword Recognition Algorithm for Analog HW Implementation

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) these days in general has two main components: 1) Feature extraction and 2) classification. Check https://theaisummer.com/speech-recognition/ for an introduction. In our case, the application is somewhat simpler than the general speech recognition in as far as we only want to recognize a single specific keyword or phrase such as 'Hello HAL' or 'Wake up!'. Particularly attractive for HW implementation with HW components that we are also investigating, would be (for 1) ) a particular variant of extracting the short term frequency power spectrum of the incoming sound with a 'silicon cochlea' in combination with (for 2) ) a recurrent neural network (RNN) structure. The latter would employ machine learning to learn to classify a particular keyword.

This project would investigate such an architecture and evaluate its performance for key word recognition.  It is part of a bigger project for neuromorphic (computing inspired by the nervous system) speech recognition where others concentrate more on the hardware development.