Competitive Wakeup Scheme for Distributed Devices
This addresses a specific issue in voice interaction for smart home users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing wake-up word systems with a new selection method.
The paper tackles the problem of multiple smart home devices responding simultaneously to the same wake-up word, which causes chaos and reduces user experience, by proposing a competitive wakeup scheme that selects the closest device based on calibrated microphone energy and user orientation, with experiments confirming its feasibility and validity.
Wakeup is the primary function in voice interaction which is the mainstream scheme in man-machine interaction (HMI) applications for smart home. All devices will response if the same wake-up word is used for all devices. This will bring chaos and reduce user quality of experience (QoE). The only way to solve this problem is to make all the devices in the same wireless local area network (WLAN) competing to wake-up based on the same scoring rule. The one closest to the user would be selected for response. To this end, a competitive wakeup scheme is proposed in this paper with elaborately designed calibration method for receiving energy of microphones. Moreover, the user orientation is assisted to determine the optimal device. Experiments reveal the feasibility and validity of this scheme.