14.4 A scalable speech recognizer with deep-neural-network acoustic models and voice-activated power gating

The applications of speech interfaces, commonly used for search and personal assistants, are diversifying to include wearables, appliances, and robots. Hardware-accelerated automatic speech recognition (ASR) is needed for scenarios that are constrained by power, system complexity, or latency. Furthermore, a wakeup mechanism, such as voice activity detection (VAD), is needed to power gate the ASR and downstream system. This paper describes IC designs for ASR and VAD that improve on the accuracy, programmability, and scalability of previous work.