Reply To: Minimum volume threshold to detect speech

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#11785
Halle Winkler
Politepix

It’s tricky — having noise cancellation and noise suppression is obviously a good thing, but the VAD in OpenEars is partial to non-noise-suppressed sources. I personally don’t use VoiceProcessingIO because it doesn’t seem to get the same degree of QA as RemoteIO (or it just has a lot more options that need QA attention) and I’ve had it stop working in a couple of minor OS updates on a couple of devices, which is a little bit too much of a needle in the haystack situation for maintaining a framework.

Actually, thinking of the VAD and its issues with noise-suppressed sources, I wonder if any of the command-line options in PocketsphinxRunConfig.h would help you. It might be worth a quick look in there to see if there is anything relevant you can turn on (maybe AGC or dithering or something).

Something I’ve noticed is that as a developer you will tend to try to find a test space with the least ambient noise possible because it’s unproductive to test speech applications in an uncontrolled environment, but real user environments are almost always noisier, so you might not need to worry too much about the corner case of an extremely quiet environment that has a slightly-less-quiet noise in it. I used to have a very similar issue when testing AllEars (which ended up providing the OpenEars code) that a sparrow would visit my balcony and the relatively quiet cheeping would totally ruin recognition, but I haven’t received user reports of similar scenarios.