Streaming End-to-End Target-Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition and Activity Detection

Abstract

Automatic speech recognition of a target speaker in the presence of interfering speakers remains a challenging issue. One approach to tackle this problem is target-speaker speech recognition, which conditions the recognition process on an embedding that characterizes the voice of the target speaker. This enables recognizing only the speech of the target speaker while ignoring interferences. In this work, we propose an end-to-end target-speaker speech recognition system based on a neural transducer architecture to allow streaming and on-device recognition. Moreover, a target-speaker speech recognition system should be able to detect when the target speaker is inactive and output nothing in such a case. We introduce training and decoding schemes to allow target-speaker activity detection within our proposed recognition system. We confirm experimentally that our proposed end-to-end system performs competitively to conventional cascade approaches of a target speech extraction module and a recognition module while reducing computation costs and allowing streaming decoding.