Audio-to-Intent Using Acoustic-Textual Subword Representations from End-to-End ASR

Accurate prediction of the user intent to interact with a voice assistant (VA) on a device (e.g. a smartphone) is critical for achieving naturalistic, engaging, and privacy-centric interactions with the VA. To this end, we present a novel approach to predict the user intention (whether the user is speaking to the device or not) directly from acoustic and textual information encoded at subword tokens which are obtained via an end-to-end (E2E) ASR model. Modeling directly the subword tokens, compared to modeling of the phonemes and/or full words, has at least two advantages: (i) it provides a unique vocabulary representation, where each token has a semantic meaning, in contrast to the phoneme-level representations, (ii) each subword token has a reusable “sub”-word acoustic pattern (that can be used to construct multiple full words), resulting in a largely reduced vocabulary space than of the full words. To learn the subword representations for the audio-to-intent classification, we extract: (i) acoustic information from an E2E-ASR model, which provides frame-level CTC posterior probabilities for the subword tokens, and (ii) textual information from a pretrained continuous bag-of-words model capturing the semantic meaning of the subword tokens. The key to our approach is that it combines acoustic subword-level posteriors with text information using the notion of positional-encoding to account for multiple ASR hypotheses simultaneously. We show that the proposed approach learns robust representations for audio- to-intent classification and correctly mitigates 93.3% of unintended user audio from invoking the VA at 99% true positive rate.