{"id":3759,"date":"2015-06-22T12:15:45","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T16:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=3759"},"modified":"2015-06-22T12:15:45","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T16:15:45","slug":"speak-and-your-device-will-listen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2015\/06\/speak-and-your-device-will-listen\/","title":{"rendered":"Speak and Your Device Will Listen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SpeakYourDevice<\/a>As a staff research scientist with Google, Carolina Parada, PHD \u201911<\/strong>, is changing the way people interact with their devices.<\/p>\n

Parada\u2019s speech recognition team recently used hot word detection, also known as keyword spotting, to create an algorithm that detects sound. The result? The popular \u201cOK Google,\u201d a catchphrase of sorts that enables users to start speaking to their phones, tablets, and, in the case of Android Wear, even their smart watches.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe algorithm behind it is just an acoustic model that detects words and simple sounds like \u2018ca\u2019 and \u2018da,\u2019\u201d says Parada. Whiting School PhD candidate Guoguo Chen, MS ’12, helped build the algorithm, thanks to an internship program that the school has with Google. Through the program, Ehsan Variani, MS \u201911, another Whiting School PhD candidate, has worked on a team parallel to Parada\u2019s that focuses on speaker verification, or helping devices understand when their primary user is talking. Parada, who graduated from the Whiting School a year earlier than her husband, Jorge Bernate, PhD \u201912, a chemical engineer, was once an intern at Google as well. Parada\u2019s graduate work at Johns Hopkins was centered in the Center for Language and Speech Processing.<\/p>\n

Although \u201cOK Google\u201d initially was available only in English, the program now is available in about 40 languages. Some features, such as the acoustic model, are language-specific, but the basic system is a general algorithm that applies to any language. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to know a language in order to build a system for that language,\u201d says Parada<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a staff research scientist with Google, Carolina Parada, PHD \u201911, is changing the way people interact with their devices. Parada\u2019s speech recognition team recently used hot word detection, also known as keyword spotting, to create an algorithm that detects sound. The result? The popular \u201cOK Google,\u201d a catchphrase of sorts that enables users to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","issue-summer-2015"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSpeak and Your Device Will Listen - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2015\/06\/speak-and-your-device-will-listen\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Speak and Your Device Will Listen - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As a staff research scientist with Google, Carolina Parada, PHD \u201911, is changing the way people interact with their devices. 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