CONF Sacchi_INTERSPEECH_2019/IDIAP Open-Vocabulary Keyword Spotting With Audio And Text Embeddings Sacchi, Niccolò Nanchen, Alexandre Jaggi, Martin Cernak, Milos ASR-free audio&text embeddings keyword spotting open vocabulary speech recognition EXTERNAL https://publications.idiap.ch/attachments/papers/2019/Sacchi_INTERSPEECH_2019.pdf PUBLIC Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 2019 DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1846 doi Keyword Spotting (KWS) systems allow detecting a set of spoken (pre-defined) keywords. Open-vocabulary KWS systems search for the keywords in the set of word hypotheses generated by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system which is computationally expensive and, therefore, often implemented as a cloud-based service. Besides, KWS systems could use also word classification algorithms that do not allow easily changing the set of words to be recognized, as the classes have to be defined a priori, even before training the system. In this paper, we propose the implementation of an open-vocabulary ASR-free KWS system based on speech and text encoders that allow matching the computed embeddings in order to spot whether a keyword has been uttered. This approach would allow choosing the set of keywords a posteriori while requiring low computational power. The experiments, performed on two different datasets, show that our method is competitive with other state of the art KWS systems while allowing for a flexibility of configuration and being computationally efficient.