A prosody-based approach to end-of-utterance detection that does not require speech recognition

In previous work we showed that state-of-the-art end-of-utterance detection (as used, for example, in dialog systems) can be improved significantly by making use of prosodic and/or language models that predict utterance endpoints, based on word and alignment output from a speech recognizer. However, using a recognizer in endpointing might not be practical in certain applications. We demonstrate that the improvements due to the prosodic knowledge can be realized largely without alignment information, i.e., without requiring a speech recognizer. A prosodic end-of-utterance detector using only speech/nonspeech detection output is still considerably more accurate and has lower latency than a baseline system based on pause-length thresholding.