Patent ID: 9589564
Date: 2017-03-07
CPC Classifications: G10L

Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method, comprising: receiving an utterance of a user by a device; obtaining acoustic features from an initial portion of the utterance, wherein the initial portion of the utterance includes a hotword that is associated with waking the device from a low power state; providing the acoustic features from the initial portion of the utterance to multiple speech locale-specific hotword classifiers of the device that process the acoustic features from the initial portion of the utterance in parallel, wherein each speech locale-specific hotword classifier is a speech recognition process using an acoustic model of a single language or a single dialect of a language and (i) is associated with a respective speech locale, (ii) is configured to classify acoustic features associated with an initial portion of an utterance as either corresponding to, or as not corresponding to, an utterance of a respective predefined term without one or more of transcribing or semantically interpreting acoustic features of any portion of the utterance, and (iii) is associated with a respective set of automatic speech recognition parameters; obtaining speech locale-specific hotword confidence scores from the speech locale-specific hotword classifiers of the device, wherein each of the speech locale-specific hotword confidence scores obtained from a corresponding speech locale-specific hotword classifier reflects a likelihood that the initial portion of the utterance includes the respective predefined term corresponding to the speech locale-specific hotword classifier; selecting a speech locale for use in generating a transcription of a subsequent portion of the utterance based on comparing speech locale-specific hotword confidence scores obtained from the multiple speech locale-specific hotword classifiers in response to the parallel processing of the acoustic features from the initial portion of the utterance by the multiple speech locale-specific hotword classifiers; selecting the set of automatic speech recognition parameters associated with the selected speech locale; and generating, by an automated speech recognizer, the transcription of the subsequent portion of the utterance using the selected set of automatic speech recognition parameters associated with the selected speech locale.