This paper presents the machine learning architecture of the Snips Voice Platform, a software solution to perform Spoken Language Understanding on microprocessors typical of IoT devices. The embedded inference is fast and accurate while enforcing privacy by design, as no personal user data is ever collected. Focusing on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding, we detail our approach to training high-performance Machine Learning models that are small enough to run in real-time on small devices. Additionally, we describe a data generation procedure that provides sufficient, high-quality training data without compromising user privacy.1 https://www.voicebot.ai/2018/03/07/new-voicebot-report-says-nearly-20-u-sadults-smart-speakers/ 2 In French: https://www.cnil.fr/fr/enceintes-intelligentes-des-assistants-vocauxconnectes-votre-vie-privee 3 https://www.eugdpr.org/
We consider the problem of performing Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) on small devices typical of IoT applications. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we outline the design of an embedded, private-by-design SLU system and show that it has performance on-par with cloud-based commercial solutions. Second, we release the datasets used in our experiments in the interest of reproducibility and in the hope that they can prove useful to the community.
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