2021/09/27 by Yu-Lin Wei, Yu‐Lin Wei, Rui Li +9
Computer Science · Engineering · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Indoor and Outdoor Localization Technologies #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech and Audio Processing #cs.SD #eess.AS #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2109.13094
12 pages, 16 figures
openalex publication_date 2021/09/27 · arxiv created 2021/09/29 · arxiv updated 2021/09/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Consider a home or office where multiple devices are running voice assistants (e.g., TVs, lights, ovens, refrigerators, etc.). A human user turns to a particular device and gives a voice command, such as ``Alexa, can you ...''. This paper focuses on the problem of detecting which device the user was facing, and therefore, enabling only that device to respond to the command. Our core intuition emerges from the fact that human voice exhibits a directional radiation pattern, and the orientation of this pattern should influence the signal received at each device. Unfortunately, indoor multipath, unknown user location, and unknown voice signals pose as critical hurdles. Through a new algorithm that estimates the line-of-sight (LoS) power from a given signal, and combined with beamforming and triangulation, we design a functional solution called CoDIR. Results from 500+ configurations, across 5 rooms and 9 different users, are encouraging. While improvements are necessary, we believe this is an important step forward in a challenging but urgent problem space.