Advances in Online Audio-Visual Meeting Transcription
This addresses the long-standing challenge of handling overlapped speech in realistic meeting settings, which is crucial for applications like automated transcription services, though it appears incremental by building on existing separation and diarization techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of overlapped speech in meeting transcription by developing an online audio-visual system that integrates continuous speech separation and speaker diarization, resulting in a 16.1% improvement in word error rate compared to a beamformer and accurate speaker attribution with only a 1.0% discrepancy when all attendees are known.
This paper describes a system that generates speaker-annotated transcripts of meetings by using a microphone array and a 360-degree camera. The hallmark of the system is its ability to handle overlapped speech, which has been an unsolved problem in realistic settings for over a decade. We show that this problem can be addressed by using a continuous speech separation approach. In addition, we describe an online audio-visual speaker diarization method that leverages face tracking and identification, sound source localization, speaker identification, and, if available, prior speaker information for robustness to various real world challenges. All components are integrated in a meeting transcription framework called SRD, which stands for "separate, recognize, and diarize". Experimental results using recordings of natural meetings involving up to 11 attendees are reported. The continuous speech separation improves a word error rate (WER) by 16.1% compared with a highly tuned beamformer. When a complete list of meeting attendees is available, the discrepancy between WER and speaker-attributed WER is only 1.0%, indicating accurate word-to-speaker association. This increases marginally to 1.6% when 50% of the attendees are unknown to the system.