AdaStreamLite: Environment-adaptive Streaming Speech Recognition on Mobile Devices

Streaming speech recognition aims to transcribe speech to text in a streaming manner, providing real-time speech interaction for smartphone users. However, it is not trivial to develop a high-performance streaming speech recognition system purely running on mobile platforms, due to the complex real-world acoustic environments and the limited computational resources of smartphones. Most existing solutions lack the generalization to unseen environments and have difficulty to work with streaming speech. In this paper, we design AdaStreamLite, an environment-adaptive streaming speech recognition tool for smartphones. AdaStreamLite interacts with its surroundings to capture the characteristics of the current acoustic environment to improve the robustness against ambient noise in a lightweight manner. We design an environment representation extractor to model acoustic environments with compact feature vectors, and construct a representation lookup table to improve the generalization of AdaStreamLite to unseen environments. We train our system using large speech datasets publicly available covering different languages. We conduct experiments in a large range of real acoustic environments with different smartphones. The results show that AdaStreamLite outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of recognition accuracy, computational resource consumption and robustness against unseen environments.