Systems and methods for energy efficient and low power distributed automatic speech recognition on wearable devices

A method comprising:

• activating a first process to be executed by a voice-activated detector when an input audio signal is detected;
• identifying, by executing an instruction of the first process with the voice-activated detector, a portion of the input audio signal including a sound to be evaluated;
• activating a second process to be executed by a key phrase detector when the sound to be evaluated is identified;
• activating, by executing an instruction of the second process with the key phrase detector, a quantizer and a transmitter when the sound to be evaluated is identified in the input audio signal;
• organizing, by executing an instruction of the second process with the key phrase detector, the sound to be evaluated into a plurality of audio features representing the sound;
• reducing, by executing an instruction of a third process with the quantizer, the audio features to generate a reduced set of audio features;
• and
• transmitting, using the transmitter, the reduced set of audio features over a low-energy communication channel.

A tangible computer readable storage medium comprising computer readable instructions which, when executed, cause a voice-activated detector implemented by a processor to at least:

• in response to detection of an input audio signal:
• activate a key phrase detector to:
• identify a portion of the input audio signal including a sound to be evaluated;
• and
• in response to identification of the sound to be evaluated:
• activate a quantizer and a transmitter;
• organize the sound to be evaluated into a plurality of audio features representing the sound;
• instruct the quantizer to reduce the audio features based on a quantization process to generate a reduced set of audio features;
• and
• instruct the transmitter to transmit the reduced set of audio features over a low-energy communication channel.

A wearable apparatus comprising:

• a voice-activated detector to activate a key phrase detector, a quantizer, and a transmitter when an input audio signal is detected;
• the key phrase detector which, when activated, is to identify a portion of the input audio signal including a sound to be evaluated, the sound to be evaluated organized into a plurality of audio features representing the sound;
• the quantizer which, when activated, is to reduce the audio features to generate a reduced set of audio features;
• and
• the transmitter which, when activated, is to transmit the reduced set of audio features over a low-energy communication channel to a companion device for dequantization of the reduced set of audio features to extract speech information from the reduced set of audio features.