Apple Explains How HomePod is Able to Recognize Siri Commands From Afar

Apple has posted a new entry on its Machine Learning Journal that explains how it's able to recognize Siri commands during loud music playback or when a user is far away.

The typical audio environment for HomePod has many challenges — echo, reverberation, and noise. Unlike Siri on iPhone, which operates close to the user’s mouth, Siri on HomePod must work well in a far-field setting. Users want to invoke Siri from many locations, like the couch or the kitchen, without regard to where HomePod sits. A complete online system, which addresses all of the environmental issues that HomePod can experience, requires a tight integration of various multichannel signal processing technologies.

Apple's Audio Software Engineering and Siri Speech teams have built a system that integrates both supervised deep learning models and unsupervised online learning algorithms and that leverages multiple microphone signals.


An in-depth description of the system is presented at the link below.

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