Voice localization using nearby wall reflections
Sheng Shen, Daguan Chen, Yu‐Lin Wei, Zhijian Yang, Romit Roy Choudhury
Abstract
Voice assistants such as Amazon Echo (Alexa) and Google Home use microphone arrays to estimate the angle of arrival (AoA) of the human voice. This paper focuses on adding user localization as a new capability to voice assistants. For any voice command, we desire Alexa to be able to localize the user inside the home. The core challenge is two-fold: (1) accurately estimating the AoAs of multipath echoes without the knowledge of the source signal, and (2) tracing back these AoAs to reverse triangulate the user's location.
Topics & Concepts
Computer scienceEcho (communications protocol)MicrophoneAngle of arrivalMultipath propagationTracingSpeech recognitionAcousticsTelecommunicationsComputer networkPhysicsOperating systemSound pressureChannel (broadcasting)Antenna (radio)Speech and Audio ProcessingIndoor and Outdoor Localization TechnologiesAdvanced Adaptive Filtering Techniques