Wake up Word (WuW)

Wake up word technology is a critical component of a voice assistant that allows your device to remain in an energy-efficient, low-power state until activated by a specific spoken phrase. Once the wake up word is detected, the system transitions into active listening mode, ready to process subsequent voice commands. Well-known examples of wake up word: “Ok, Google”, “Hey, Siri”.

Key features

Energy Efficiency:
The system initiates recognition only when speech is detected, as detecting speech and silence requires significantly fewer resources than continuous recognition.

Data Privacy:
Since the processing occurs locally, your voice data does not need to be transmitted over the Internet, ensuring data remains private.

How It Works

1. Passive Listening:
   The device continuously monitors ambient audio for the specific acoustic signature of the wake up word.

2. Acoustic Modeling:
   An embedded, low-resource acoustic model is used to filter the audio stream. The model is optimized for efficiency and sensitivity, ensuring accurate detection even in the presence of background noise.

3. Confidence Scoring:
   The system assigns a confidence score to each detection. When the score surpasses a predefined threshold (for instance, 5000), the wake up word is considered recognized.

4. Activation:
   Upon recognition, the wake up word model temporarily activates the main speech recognition engine, which then processes subsequent commands.