Query By Example Keyword Spotting

Abstract: Voice user interfaces have been growing in popularity and with them an interest for open vocabulary keyword spotting. In this thesis we focus on one particular approach to open vocabulary keyword spotting, query by example keyword spotting. Three types of query by example keyword spotting approaches are described and evaluated: sequence distances, speech to phonemes and deep distance learning. Evaluation is done on a series of custom tasks designed to measure a variety of aspects. The Google Speech Commands benchmark is used for evaluation as well, this to make it more comparable to existing works. From the results, the deep distance learning approach seem most promising in most environments except when memory is very constrained; in which sequence distances might be considered. The speech to phonemes methods is lacking in the usability evaluation.