US Patent 11978435 Long-context end-to-end speech recognition system

This invention relates generally to speech processing and more particularly to end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) that utilizes long contextual information. Some embodiments of the invention provide a system and a method for end-to-end ASR suitable for recognizing long audio recordings such as lecture and conversational speeches. This disclosure includes a Transformer-based ASR system that utilizes contextual information, wherein the Transformer accepts multiple utterances at the same time and predicts transcript for the last utterance. This is repeated in a sliding-window fashion with one-utterance shifts to recognize the entire recording. In addition, some embodiments of the present invention may use acoustic and/or text features obtained from only the previous utterances spoken by the same speaker as the last utterance when the long audio recording includes multiple speakers.