Convolutional Neural Network Smartphone App

A convolutional neural network smartphone app for real-time voice activity detection would be able to identify when a person is speaking and automatically start recording their voice. This would be useful for people who want to record conversations or meetings without having to manually start and stop the recording.

This paper presents a smartphone app that performs real-time voice activity detection based on a convolutional neural network. Real-time implementation issues are discussed showing how the slow inference time associated with convolutional neural networks is addressed. The developed smartphone app is meant to act as a switch for noise reduction in the signal processing pipelines of hearing devices, enabling noise estimation or classification to be conducted in noise-only parts of noisy speech signals. The developed smartphone app is compared with a previously developed voice activity detection app as well as with two highly cited voice activity detection algorithms. The experimental results indicate that the developed app using a convolutional neural network outperforms the previously developed smartphone app.