Howl: A Deployed, Open-Source Wake Word Detection System
This provides a fully productionized, open-source wake word detection system for web browser deployment, addressing a need for accessible speech interactivity tools, though it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The authors tackled the problem of wake word detection by developing Howl, an open-source toolkit with native support for open speech datasets, and reported benchmark results on Speech Commands and a custom dataset built from Mozilla Common Voice.
We describe Howl, an open-source wake word detection toolkit with native support for open speech datasets, like Mozilla Common Voice and Google Speech Commands. We report benchmark results on Speech Commands and our own freely available wake word detection dataset, built from MCV. We operationalize our system for Firefox Voice, a plugin enabling speech interactivity for the Firefox web browser. Howl represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully productionized yet open-source wake word detection toolkit with a web browser deployment target. Our codebase is at https://github.com/castorini/howl.