US Patent 10304475 Trigger word based beam selection

An audio capture device that incorporates a beamformer and beam-specific trigger word detection. Audio data from each beam is processed by a low power trigger word detector, such as a neural network or other trained model to detect if audio data (such as an audio frame or feature vector corresponding thereto) likely includes part of a trigger word. The beam that either most strongly represents a trigger word portion or represents a trigger word portion most early in time may be selected for further processing such as speech processing or confirmation by a more robust power intensive trigger word detector.