A garbage model generation technique for embedded speech recognisers

In this paper we present a simple but effective technique to help the designer of a voice-operated appliance add out-of-grammar command rejection capabilities, with a minimal effort and without overly degrading the recognition accuracy. Given the desired operational grammar of the appliance, and starting from a generic pre-trained acoustic model and comprehensive dictionary, we use a speech recogniser to identify suitable decoys to be added to the target grammar. These decoys will capture most of the spoken out-of-vocabulary words, and with appropriate changes to the desired grammar, will make the rejection of unintended commands quite easy. An evaluation of the performance of the proposed approach has been carried out on a sample appliance we developed, and tested with several users, under different acoustic conditions, in a command-spotting scenario. The reported results show that the proposed approach largely outperforms the standard phone loop-based approach.