IP Library Granted Patent US 11,741,943
Granted Patent B2
US 11,741,943 · App. 17/224,967 · Granted Aug 29, 2023

Method and system for acoustic model conditioning on non-phoneme information features

Inventors: Zizu Gowayyed (San Francisco, CA); Keyvan Mohajer (Los Gatos, CA)
Assignee: SoundHound, Inc
G10L15/02G10L15/04G10L15/22G10L2015/025
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Quick Facts
Patent No.
US 11,741,943
App. No.
17/224,967
Granted
Aug 29, 2023
Kind
B2
Abstract

A method and system for acoustic model conditioning on non-phoneme information features for optimized automatic speech recognition is provided. The method includes using an encoder model to encode sound embedding from a known key phrase of speech and conditioning an acoustic model with the sound embedding to optimize its performance in inferring the probabilities of phonemes in the speech. The sound embedding can comprise non-phoneme information related to the key phrase and the following utterance. Further, the encoder model and the acoustic model can be neural networks that are jointly trained with audio data.

Claims (42)

1. A computer-implemented method of inferring phoneme probabilities in speech audio, the method comprising:

receiving, at a computing device, a first segment of speech from a user, wherein the first segment of speech corresponds to a key phrase with known phonemes;

generating, using an encoder model, a sound embedding from the first segment of speech, wherein the sound embedding comprises information of non-phoneme features of the first segment of speech, wherein the information of non-phoneme features comprises at least one of voice, noise, accent, and environmental attributes associated with the first segment of speech;

receiving a second segment of speech following the first segment of speech from the same user; and

inferring, using an acoustic model conditioned on the sound embedding, the phoneme probabilities related to the second segment of speech.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , further comprising:

storing the sound embedding in a memory device associated with the computing device.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the acoustic model is trained on labeled samples of speech audio, each of the labeled samples having a corresponding sound embedding.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 3 , wherein the labeled samples include a multiplicity of voices mixed with a multiplicity of noise profiles, wherein the first segment and the second segment are mixed with the same noise profile for each sample.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the encoder model is jointly trained with the acoustic model.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , further comprising:

generating, using a second encoder model, a second sound embedding from the first segment of the speech, wherein the acoustic model is further conditioned on the second sound embedding to infer the phoneme probabilities related to the second segment of speech.

7. A computer-implemented method of conditioning an acoustic model for speech recognition, the method comprising:

receiving, at an acoustic model, a sound embedding comprising information of non-phoneme features of a first segment of speech from a user, wherein the first segment of speech corresponds to a key phrase with known phonemes, wherein the acoustic model is trained to condition its output based on the sound embedding, wherein the information of non-phoneme features comprises at least one of voice, noise, accent, and environmental attributes associated with the first segment of speech;

receiving a second segment of speech following the first segment of speech from the same user; and

inferring, using the acoustic model, phoneme probabilities of the second segment of speech.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 7 , further comprising:

generating, using an encoder model, the sound embedding based on an audio signal of the first segment of speech, wherein the first segment of speech corresponds to a key phrase with known phonemes.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 8 , further comprising:

generating, using a second encoder model, a second sound embedding from the first segment of speech, wherein the acoustic model is further trained on the second sound embedding to infer the phoneme probabilities related to the second segment of speech.

10. The computer-implemented method of claim 8 , further comprising:

training the encoder model jointly with the acoustic model based on the sound embedding.

11. The computer-implemented method of claim 7 , wherein the acoustic model is trained on labeled samples of speech audio, each of the labeled samples having a corresponding sound embedding.

12. The computer-implemented method of claim 11 , wherein the labeled samples include a multiplicity of voices mixed with a multiplicity of noise profiles, wherein the first segment and the second segment are mixed with the same noise profile for each sample.

13. A computerized speech processing system, the system being configured to:

receive an audio signal of a key phrase from a user, wherein the key phrase has known phonemes;

generate, using an encoder model, a sound embedding based on the audio signal, wherein the sound embedding comprises information of non-phoneme features of the key phrase, wherein the information of non-phoneme features comprises at least one of voice, noise, accent, and environmental attributes associated with the first segment of speech;

receiving speech following the key phrase from the same user; and

recognize the speech using an acoustic model, wherein the acoustic model is trained to condition its output based on the sound embedding.

14. The computerized speech processing system of claim 13 , wherein the outputs of the acoustic model comprise phoneme probabilities of an utterance following the key phrase.

15. The computerized speech processing system of claim 13 , wherein the information of non-phoneme features comprise at least one of voice, noise, accent, and environmental attributes associated with the key phrase.

16. The computerized speech processing system of claim 13 , wherein the encoder model is jointly trained with the acoustic model based on the sound embedding.

17. The computerized speech processing system of claim 13 , further configured to:

store the sound embedding in a memory device; and

transmit the stored sound embedding and an audio signal of an utterance following the key phrase over a network to a speech recognition server.

18. The computerized speech processing system of claim 13 , further configured to:

receive an audio signal of an utterance following the key phrase; and

infer, using the trained acoustic model, phoneme probabilities of the utterance.

19. The computerized speech processing system of claim 13 , further configured to:

generate, using a second encoder model, a second sound embedding based on the audio signal, wherein the acoustic model is trained to condition its output based on the second sound embedding.

20. The computerized speech processing system of claim 13 , wherein the acoustic model is trained on labeled samples of speech audio, each of the labeled samples having a corresponding sound embedding, and

wherein the labeled samples include a multiplicity of voices mixed with a multiplicity of noise profiles, wherein the first segment and the second segment are mixed with the same noise profile for each sample.

Assignments (7)
TERMINATION AND RELEASE OF SECURITY INTEREST IN PATENTS Recorded Dec 3, 2024
From: MONROE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT ADVISORS, LLC, AS COLLATERAL AGENT
To: SOUNDHOUND, INC.
Reel/Frame 069480/0312 →
SECURITY INTEREST Recorded Aug 9, 2024
From: SOUNDHOUND, INC.
To: MONROE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT ADVISORS, LLC, AS COLLATERAL AGENT
Reel/Frame 068526/0413 →
RELEASE OF SECURITY INTEREST Recorded Jun 11, 2024
From: ACP POST OAK CREDIT II LLC, AS COLLATERAL AGENT
To: SOUNDHOUND, INC.; SOUNDHOUND AI IP, LLC
Reel/Frame 067698/0845 →
ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNOR'S INTEREST Recorded Jun 27, 2023
From: SOUNDHOUND AI IP HOLDING, LLC
To: SOUNDHOUND AI IP, LLC
Reel/Frame 064205/0676 →
ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNOR'S INTEREST Recorded Jun 23, 2023
From: SOUNDHOUND, INC.
To: SOUNDHOUND AI IP HOLDING, LLC
Reel/Frame 064083/0484 →
SECURITY INTEREST Recorded Apr 17, 2023
From: SOUNDHOUND, INC.; SOUNDHOUND AI IP, LLC
To: ACP POST OAK CREDIT II LLC
Reel/Frame 063349/0355 →
ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNOR'S INTEREST Recorded Apr 8, 2021
From: GOWAYYED, ZIZU; MOHAJER, KEYVAN
To: SOUNDHOUND, INC.
Reel/Frame 055867/0923 →