In-vehicle circumstantial speech recognition

Abstract

A method of circumstantial speech recognition in a vehicle. A plurality of parameters associated with a plurality of vehicle functions are monitored as an indication of current vehicle circumstances. At least one vehicle function is identified as a candidate for user-intended ASR control based on user interaction with the vehicle. The identified vehicle function is then used to disambiguate between potential commands contained in speech received from the user.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates to speech signal processing and, more particularly, to automatic speech recognition (ASR) for controlling vehicle functions. Background technique [0002] ASR technology enables computing devices equipped with microphones to translate speech, providing an alternative to traditional human input devices such as keyboards or keypads. A typical ASR system includes several basic components. A microphone and an acoustic interface receive utterance of words from the user and digitize the utterance into acoustic data. Acoustic preprocessors parse acoustic data into information-bearing acoustic features. The decoder uses the acoustic model to decode the acoustic features into utterance hypotheses. The decoder produces a confidence value for each hypothesis, reflecting how well each hypothesis phonetically matches a subword of each utterance, and selects the best hypothesis for each subword. Using a language model, the decoder c...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

[0003] One problem encountered with ASR-enabled vehicle function controls is that while such a system can correctly decode user input speech, it may incorrectly apply recognized speech to non- Intended Vehicle Functions

In other words, current ASR-capable vehicle function controls have significant difficulty disambiguating between speech used for one vehicle function and speech used for some other vehicle function

For example, a user might say "let me hear some traffic" to cause the vehicle radio to play music from the 1960s rock band Traffic, but with ASR A capable vehicle controller may misinterpret the request and instead cause another vehicle device to play a route traffic report

Thus, users of ASR-capable vehicles have become frustrated with the situation