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Albayzin 2024 Wake-Up Word Detection Challenge

Technology
Artificial Intelligence Trends

In the Discovery area of Telefónica Innovación Digital, we work to ensure that technology is at the service of people and not the other way around. Therefore, one of the Digital Life Disruption Lab team's lines of work is to humanize technology, making it natural, efficient and accessible so that all people, regardless of their age or condition, can make use of its benefits.  
  
One of the backbones of this advance is natural language and control by means of vocal interfaces. Specifically, the detection of key words, known as ‘wake-up words’, is a fundamental part of this communication chain.  Therefore, Discovery wants to promote research that is committed to the progress of this technology. In this context, we have organized a challenge in the framework of the Albayzin Evaluations, a biannual event whose results are presented at the IberSpeech conference. 
  
The Albayzin Evaluations represent a series of challenges that seek to consolidate and advance Spain's leading position in research on the Spanish language and co-official languages, such as Catalan, Basque and Galician. Telefónica has been an active participant in these evaluations, especially in the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) challenge, where we have competed in the last three editions. In our 2022 participation, we won thanks to our collaboration with the Speech@FIT research team at Brno University of Technology. 
  
The challenge we are proposing this time aims to improve the detection of wake-up words. For the evaluation, Telefónica has proposed a dataset that participants will be able to use to train their models. Evaluation data has been released, allowing the performance of each proposed system to be measured. The key dates for the challenge are as follows: 

 
  • May 20th, 2024: Registration opens 
  • June 3rd, 2024: Release of training and development data 
  • July 31st, 2024: Registration deadline. 
  • September 2nd, 2024 Release of evaluation data 
  • October 18th, 2024: Submission deadline 
  • October 31st, 2024: System results distributed to participants 
  • November 12th, 2024: Official results presented publicly and presented in Iberspeech 2024 Albayzin Evaluations special session in Aveiro.

If you are interested in participating, you can find information of interest below.


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