Small-footprint keyword spotting using deep neural networks

Our application requires a keyword spotting system with a small memory footprint, low computational cost, and high precision. To meet these requirements, we propose a simple approach based on deep neural networks. A deep neural network is trained to directly predict the keyword(s) or subword units of the keyword(s) followed by a posterior handling method producing a final confidence score. Keyword recognition results achieve 45% relative improvement with respect to a competitive Hidden Markov Model-based system, while performance in the presence of babble noise shows 39% relative improvement.