TRILLsson: Small, Universal Speech Representations for Paralinguistic Tasks

Posted by Joel Shor, Staff Software Engineer, Google Research

In recent years, we have seen dramatic improvements on lexical tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, machine systems still struggle to understand paralinguistic aspects — such as tone, emotion, whether a speaker is wearing a mask, etc. Understanding these aspects represents one of the remaining difficult problems in machine hearing. In addition, state-of-the-art results often come from ultra-large models trained on private data, making them impractical to run …

machine hearing on-device learning self-supervised learning small speech