Communications of the ACM
Research Team Develops Voice Localization Techniques for Smart Speakers
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) have created a system with which the Amazon Alexa smart speaker can localize a user's whereabouts based on their voice.
Credit: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Coordinated Science Lab
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) have created a system that uses the Amazon Alexa smart speaker's microphone array in combination with echoes of one’s voice to localize a user's whereabouts.
CSL's Sheng Shen said the VocLoc system uses an "align-and-cancel algorithm” that identifies the directions from which it receives each voice signal and uses them to reverse-triangulate the location of the person speaking.
The system also spontaneously learns some aspects of the room's geometry, to help with that triangulation.
CSL's Romit Roy Choudhury said, "Location can help Alexa in improving speech recognition, since different speech vocabularies and models can be loaded."
From University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Coordinated Science Lab
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