English

Howl: A Deployed, Open-Source Wake Word Detection System

Computation and Language 2020-08-24 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We describe Howl, an open-source wake word detection toolkit with native support for open speech datasets, like Mozilla Common Voice and Google Speech Commands. We report benchmark results on Speech Commands and our own freely available wake word detection dataset, built from MCV. We operationalize our system for Firefox Voice, a plugin enabling speech interactivity for the Firefox web browser. Howl represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully productionized yet open-source wake word detection toolkit with a web browser deployment target. Our codebase is at https://github.com/castorini/howl.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.09606,
  title  = {Howl: A Deployed, Open-Source Wake Word Detection System},
  author = {Raphael Tang and Jaejun Lee and Afsaneh Razi and Julia Cambre and Ian Bicking and Jofish Kaye and Jimmy Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.09606},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

The first two authors contributed equally

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:01:32.143Z