Random Words Detected by Azure Speech Recognizer in Silence

Question

Hello Azure Support Team,

I am currently using the Azure Speech Service to recognize speech inputs in my application. The setup of my speech recognizer is as follows:

export const createSpeechRecognizer = () => {
  const speechRecognitionConfig = SpeechSDK.SpeechConfig.fromSubscription(avatarAppConfig.cogSvcSubKey, avatarAppConfig.cogSvcRegion);
  speechRecognitionConfig.setProperty(SpeechSDK.PropertyId.SpeechServiceConnection_LanguageIdMode, "Continuous");

  const autoDetectSourceLanguageConfig = SpeechSDK.AutoDetectSourceLanguageConfig.fromLanguages(avatarAppConfig.sttLocales.split(','));
  const recognizer = SpeechSDK.SpeechRecognizer.FromConfig(speechRecognitionConfig, autoDetectSourceLanguageConfig, SpeechSDK.AudioConfig.fromDefaultMicrophoneInput());

  return recognizer;
}

speechRecognizer.recognized = async (s, e) => {
        if (e.result.reason === SpeechSDK.ResultReason.RecognizedSpeech) {
          const userQuery = e.result.text.trim();
          if (userQuery) {
            console.log("User query in mic:", userQuery);
              handleUserQuery(userQuery);
          }
        }
      };

While using this setup, I am experiencing an issue where the speech recognizer sometimes detects random words as input even when there is complete silence. Some examples of the random words detected include "Play", "BJP", etc.

This behavior is unexpected and impacts the functionality of my application. Could you please assist me in resolving this issue? Any guidance or suggestions on how to mitigate this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your support.

Best regards,
Abdul Subhan
abdul@inextlabs.com

Answer 1

Hi @Abdul Subhan

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A forum.

I understand that you are experiencing an issue where the speech recognizer sometimes detects random words as input even when there is complete silence. This issue could be caused by the microphone sensitivity being too high, causing the recognizer to pick up background noise and interpret it as speech.

To mitigate this problem, you can try adjusting the microphone sensitivity to a lower value. You can also try using noise suppression techniques to improve the speech recognizer's performance in noisy environments. However, please note that the Azure Speech SDK does not provide an option for noise cancellation as it uses the audio from the selected source (file or microphone) as is and passes it to the service.

A workaround could be to use an external microphone instead of the device microphone which can pick up other sounds or use the speech devices SDK which is actually a hardware device with the speech devices SDK and has the capability of noise suppression and echo cancellation.

If you have already tried adjusting the settings and using noise suppression, and the issue still persists, you can try some of the other solutions mentioned in the Azure documentation on how to mitigate or resolve echo issues.

I hope this information helps.

Answer 2

Hi Azure Support,

I'm facing the same issue when using the Python SDK.

My microphone is physically muted (off button) and I keep on getting random small recognition results just as Abdul posted ("Play", "BJP", etc.).

Is there any way to fix this?

Thanks.

Best,

Tiago Ribeiro