A Near-Real-Time Processing Ego Speech Filtering Pipeline Designed for Speech Interruption During Human-Robot Interaction
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| _version_ | 1866914806848552960 |
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| author | Li, Yue Kunneman, Florian A. Hindriks, Koen V. |
| author_facet | Li, Yue Kunneman, Florian A. Hindriks, Koen V. |
| contents | With current state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, it is not possible to transcribe overlapping speech audio streams separately. Consequently, when these ASR systems are used as part of a social robot like Pepper for interaction with a human, it is common practice to close the robot's microphone while it is talking itself. This prevents the human users to interrupt the robot, which limits speech-based human-robot interaction. To enable a more natural interaction which allows for such interruptions, we propose an audio processing pipeline for filtering out robot's ego speech using only a single-channel microphone. This pipeline takes advantage of the possibility to feed the robot ego speech signal, generated by a text-to-speech API, as training data into a machine learning model. The proposed pipeline combines a convolutional neural network and spectral subtraction to extract overlapping human speech from the audio recorded by the robot-embedded microphone. When evaluating on a held-out test set, we find that this pipeline outperforms our previous approach to this task, as well as state-of-the-art target speech extraction systems that were retrained on the same dataset. We have also integrated the proposed pipeline into a lightweight robot software development framework to make it available for broader use. As a step towards demonstrating the feasibility of deploying our pipeline, we use this framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the pipeline in a small lab-based feasibility pilot using the social robot Pepper. Our results show that when participants interrupt the robot, the pipeline can extract the participant's speech from one-second streaming audio buffers received by the robot-embedded single-channel microphone, hence in near-real time. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_13477 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | A Near-Real-Time Processing Ego Speech Filtering Pipeline Designed for Speech Interruption During Human-Robot Interaction Li, Yue Kunneman, Florian A. Hindriks, Koen V. Human-Computer Interaction Sound Audio and Speech Processing With current state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, it is not possible to transcribe overlapping speech audio streams separately. Consequently, when these ASR systems are used as part of a social robot like Pepper for interaction with a human, it is common practice to close the robot's microphone while it is talking itself. This prevents the human users to interrupt the robot, which limits speech-based human-robot interaction. To enable a more natural interaction which allows for such interruptions, we propose an audio processing pipeline for filtering out robot's ego speech using only a single-channel microphone. This pipeline takes advantage of the possibility to feed the robot ego speech signal, generated by a text-to-speech API, as training data into a machine learning model. The proposed pipeline combines a convolutional neural network and spectral subtraction to extract overlapping human speech from the audio recorded by the robot-embedded microphone. When evaluating on a held-out test set, we find that this pipeline outperforms our previous approach to this task, as well as state-of-the-art target speech extraction systems that were retrained on the same dataset. We have also integrated the proposed pipeline into a lightweight robot software development framework to make it available for broader use. As a step towards demonstrating the feasibility of deploying our pipeline, we use this framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the pipeline in a small lab-based feasibility pilot using the social robot Pepper. Our results show that when participants interrupt the robot, the pipeline can extract the participant's speech from one-second streaming audio buffers received by the robot-embedded single-channel microphone, hence in near-real time. |
| title | A Near-Real-Time Processing Ego Speech Filtering Pipeline Designed for Speech Interruption During Human-Robot Interaction |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction Sound Audio and Speech Processing |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13477 |