Deep Spoken Keyword Spotting: An Overview
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Abstract (arXiv)
Spoken keyword spotting (KWS) deals with the identification of keywords in audio streams and has become a fast-growing technology thanks to the paradigm shift introduced by deep learning a few years ago. This has allowed the rapid embedding of deep KWS in a myriad of small electronic devices with different purposes like the activation of voice assistants. Prospects suggest a sustained growth in terms of social use of this technology. Thus, it is not surprising that deep KWS has become a hot research topic among speech scientists, who constantly look for KWS performance improvement and computational complexity reduction. This context motivates this paper, in which we conduct a literature review into deep spoken KWS to assist practitioners and researchers who are interested in this technology. Specifically, this overview has a comprehensive nature by covering a thorough analysis of deep KWS systems (which includes speech features, acoustic modeling and posterior handling), robustness methods, applications, datasets, evaluation metrics, performance of deep KWS systems and audio-visual KWS. The analysis performed in this paper allows us to identify a number of directions for future research, including directions adopted from automatic speech recognition research and directions that are unique to the problem of spoken KWS.
Key facts. Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 86 of its 269 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2021.
Builds on
86 of 269 references.
References · 86
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50 most cited of 86 All 86 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 9; 2023: 11; 2024: 9; 2025: 8; 2026: 6.
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- 2024On-Device Domain Learning for Keyword Spotting on Low-Power Extreme Edge Embedded Systemscited by 13
- 2023Few-Shot Open-Set Learning for On-Device Customization of KeyWord Spotting Systemscited by 9
- 2023Online Continual Learning in Keyword Spotting for Low-Resource Devices via Pooling High-Order Temporal Statisticscited by 9
- 2022Rainbow Keywords: Efficient Incremental Learning for Online Spoken Keyword Spottingcited by 8
- 2023Open-vocabulary Keyword-spotting with Adaptive Instance Normalizationcited by 8
- 2024Self-Learning for Personalized Keyword Spotting on Ultra-Low-Power Audio Sensorscited by 7
- 2022VSVC: Backdoor attack against Keyword Spotting based on Voiceprint Selection and Voice Conversioncited by 6
- 2022Keyword Spotting System and Evaluation of Pruning and Quantization Methods on Low-power Edge Microcontrollerscited by 4
- 2022LiCo-Net: Linearized Convolution Network for Hardware-efficient Keyword Spottingcited by 4
- 2024Noise-Robust Keyword Spotting through Self-supervised Pretrainingcited by 4
- 2024MM-KWS: Multi-modal Prompts for Multilingual User-defined Keyword Spottingcited by 4
- 2025AnalyticKWS: Towards Exemplar-Free Analytic Class Incremental Learning for Small-footprint Keyword Spottingcited by 4
31 more
- 2022Improving Label-Deficient Keyword Spotting Through Self-Supervised Pretrainingcited by 3
- 2022Filterbank Learning for Noise-Robust Small-Footprint Keyword Spottingcited by 3
- 2023Speech Understanding on Tiny Devices with A Learning Cachecited by 3
- 2024ED-sKWS: Early-Decision Spiking Neural Networks for Rapid,and Energy-Efficient Keyword Spottingcited by 3
- 2025End-to-End Efficiency in Keyword Spotting: A System-Level Approach for Embedded Microcontrollerscited by 3
- 2022Exploring Sequence-to-Sequence Transformer-Transducer Models for Keyword Spottingcited by 2
- 2023To Wake-up or Not to Wake-up: Reducing Keyword False Alarm by Successive Refinementcited by 2
- 2023Latent Phrase Matching for Dysarthric Speechcited by 2
- 2024GE2E-KWS: Generalized End-to-End Training and Evaluation for Zero-shot Keyword Spottingcited by 2
- 2025OASI: Objective-Aware Surrogate Initialization for Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization in TinyML Keyword Spottingcited by 2
- 2026Hardware-accelerated graph neural networks: an alternative approach for neuromorphic event-based audio classification and keyword spotting on SoC FPGAcited by 2
- 2023Spot keywords from very noisy and mixed speechcited by 1
- 2023Robust Wake-Up Word Detection by Two-stage Multi-resolution Ensemblescited by 1
- 2023Personalizing Keyword Spotting with Speaker Informationcited by 1
- 2024End-to-End User-Defined Keyword Spotting using Shifted Delta Coefficientscited by 1
- 2024Text-Based Detection of On-Hold Scripts in Contact Center Callscited by 1
- 2025LHGNN: Local-Higher Order Graph Neural Networks For Audio Classification and Taggingcited by 1
- 2025Adaptive Noise Resilient Keyword Spotting Using One-Shot Learningcited by 1
- 2022AB/BA analysis: A framework for estimating keyword spotting recall improvement while maintaining audio privacycited by 0
- 2022Harnessing the Power of Explanations for Incremental Training: A LIME-Based Approachcited by 0
- 2023Handling the Alignment for Wake Word Detection: A Comparison Between Alignment-Based, Alignment-Free and Hybrid Approachescited by 0
- 2023Semi-Supervised Federated Learning for Keyword Spottingcited by 0
- 2024Advancing Airport Tower Command Recognition: Integrating Squeeze-and-Excitation and Broadcasted Residual Learningcited by 0
- 2025Keyword Spotting with Hyper-Matched Filters for Small Footprint Devicescited by 0
- 2025Keyword Mamba: Spoken Keyword Spotting with State Space Modelscited by 0
- 2025Zero-Shot KWS for Children's Speech using Layer-Wise Features from SSL Modelscited by 0
- 2026OnDA: On-device Channel Pruning for Efficient Personalized Keyword Spottingcited by 0
- 2026"OK Aura, Be Fair With Me": Demographics-Agnostic Training for Bias Mitigation in Wake-up Word Detectioncited by 0
- 2026Keyword spotting using convolutional neural network for speech recognition in Hindicited by 0
- 2026Does language matter for spoken word classification? A multilingual generative meta-learning approachcited by 0
- 2026A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detectioncited by 0
- 2026A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection16 Jun 2026
- 2026Does language matter for spoken word classification? A multilingual generative meta-learning approach13 May 2026
- 2026Keyword spotting using convolutional neural network for speech recognition in Hindi26 Apr 2026
- 2026"OK Aura, Be Fair With Me": Demographics-Agnostic Training for Bias Mitigation in Wake-up Word Detection7 Apr 2026
- 2026OnDA: On-device Channel Pruning for Efficient Personalized Keyword Spotting25 Feb 2026
- 2026Hardware-accelerated graph neural networks: an alternative approach for neuromorphic event-based audio classification and keyword spotting on SoC FPGA18 Feb 2026
- 2025OASI: Objective-Aware Surrogate Initialization for Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization in TinyML Keyword Spotting17 Dec 2025
- 2025End-to-End Efficiency in Keyword Spotting: A System-Level Approach for Embedded Microcontrollers8 Sep 2025
- 2025Zero-Shot KWS for Children's Speech using Layer-Wise Features from SSL Models28 Aug 2025
- 2025Keyword Mamba: Spoken Keyword Spotting with State Space Models10 Aug 2025
- 2025Keyword Spotting with Hyper-Matched Filters for Small Footprint Devices6 Aug 2025
- 2025AnalyticKWS: Towards Exemplar-Free Analytic Class Incremental Learning for Small-footprint Keyword Spotting17 May 2025
31 more
- 2025Adaptive Noise Resilient Keyword Spotting Using One-Shot Learning14 May 2025
- 2025LHGNN: Local-Higher Order Graph Neural Networks For Audio Classification and Tagging7 Jan 2025
- 2024GE2E-KWS: Generalized End-to-End Training and Evaluation for Zero-shot Keyword Spotting22 Oct 2024
- 2024Self-Learning for Personalized Keyword Spotting on Ultra-Low-Power Audio Sensors22 Aug 2024
- 2024Text-Based Detection of On-Hold Scripts in Contact Center Calls13 Jul 2024
- 2024Advancing Airport Tower Command Recognition: Integrating Squeeze-and-Excitation and Broadcasted Residual Learning26 Jun 2024
- 2024ED-sKWS: Early-Decision Spiking Neural Networks for Rapid,and Energy-Efficient Keyword Spotting14 Jun 2024
- 2024MM-KWS: Multi-modal Prompts for Multilingual User-defined Keyword Spotting11 Jun 2024
- 2024End-to-End User-Defined Keyword Spotting using Shifted Delta Coefficients23 May 2024
- 2024Noise-Robust Keyword Spotting through Self-supervised Pretraining27 Mar 2024
- 2024On-Device Domain Learning for Keyword Spotting on Low-Power Extreme Edge Embedded Systems12 Mar 2024
- 2023Speech Understanding on Tiny Devices with A Learning Cache30 Nov 2023
- 2023Personalizing Keyword Spotting with Speaker Information6 Nov 2023
- 2023Robust Wake-Up Word Detection by Two-stage Multi-resolution Ensembles17 Oct 2023
- 2023Open-vocabulary Keyword-spotting with Adaptive Instance Normalization13 Sep 2023
- 2023Online Continual Learning in Keyword Spotting for Low-Resource Devices via Pooling High-Order Temporal Statistics24 Jul 2023
- 2023Latent Phrase Matching for Dysarthric Speech8 Jun 2023
- 2023Few-Shot Open-Set Learning for On-Device Customization of KeyWord Spotting Systems3 Jun 2023
- 2023Spot keywords from very noisy and mixed speech28 May 2023
- 2023Semi-Supervised Federated Learning for Keyword Spotting9 May 2023
- 2023To Wake-up or Not to Wake-up: Reducing Keyword False Alarm by Successive Refinement6 Apr 2023
- 2023Handling the Alignment for Wake Word Detection: A Comparison Between Alignment-Based, Alignment-Free and Hybrid Approaches17 Feb 2023
- 2022VSVC: Backdoor attack against Keyword Spotting based on Voiceprint Selection and Voice Conversion20 Dec 2022
- 2022Filterbank Learning for Noise-Robust Small-Footprint Keyword Spotting19 Nov 2022
- 2022Exploring Sequence-to-Sequence Transformer-Transducer Models for Keyword Spotting11 Nov 2022
- 2022LiCo-Net: Linearized Convolution Network for Hardware-efficient Keyword Spotting9 Nov 2022
- 2022Harnessing the Power of Explanations for Incremental Training: A LIME-Based Approach2 Nov 2022
- 2022Improving Label-Deficient Keyword Spotting Through Self-Supervised Pretraining4 Oct 2022
- 2022Keyword Spotting System and Evaluation of Pruning and Quantization Methods on Low-power Edge Microcontrollers4 Aug 2022
- 2022AB/BA analysis: A framework for estimating keyword spotting recall improvement while maintaining audio privacy18 Apr 2022
- 2022Rainbow Keywords: Efficient Incremental Learning for Online Spoken Keyword Spotting30 Mar 2022
- 2024On-Device Domain Learning for Keyword Spotting on Low-Power Extreme Edge Embedded Systemscited by 13
- 2023Few-Shot Open-Set Learning for On-Device Customization of KeyWord Spotting Systemscited by 9
- 2023Online Continual Learning in Keyword Spotting for Low-Resource Devices via Pooling High-Order Temporal Statisticscited by 9
- 2022Rainbow Keywords: Efficient Incremental Learning for Online Spoken Keyword Spottingcited by 8
- 2023Open-vocabulary Keyword-spotting with Adaptive Instance Normalizationcited by 8
- 2024Self-Learning for Personalized Keyword Spotting on Ultra-Low-Power Audio Sensorscited by 7
- 2022Keyword Spotting System and Evaluation of Pruning and Quantization Methods on Low-power Edge Microcontrollerscited by 4
- 2022LiCo-Net: Linearized Convolution Network for Hardware-efficient Keyword Spottingcited by 4
- 2024Noise-Robust Keyword Spotting through Self-supervised Pretrainingcited by 4
- 2024MM-KWS: Multi-modal Prompts for Multilingual User-defined Keyword Spottingcited by 4
- 2025AnalyticKWS: Towards Exemplar-Free Analytic Class Incremental Learning for Small-footprint Keyword Spottingcited by 4
- 2022Improving Label-Deficient Keyword Spotting Through Self-Supervised Pretrainingcited by 3
12 most cited of 41 All 41 (JSON)
- 2026A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection16 Jun 2026
- 2026Does language matter for spoken word classification? A multilingual generative meta-learning approach13 May 2026
- 2026Keyword spotting using convolutional neural network for speech recognition in Hindi26 Apr 2026
- 2026"OK Aura, Be Fair With Me": Demographics-Agnostic Training for Bias Mitigation in Wake-up Word Detection7 Apr 2026
- 2026OnDA: On-device Channel Pruning for Efficient Personalized Keyword Spotting25 Feb 2026
- 2026Hardware-accelerated graph neural networks: an alternative approach for neuromorphic event-based audio classification and keyword spotting on SoC FPGA18 Feb 2026
- 2025OASI: Objective-Aware Surrogate Initialization for Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization in TinyML Keyword Spotting17 Dec 2025
- 2025End-to-End Efficiency in Keyword Spotting: A System-Level Approach for Embedded Microcontrollers8 Sep 2025
- 2025Zero-Shot KWS for Children's Speech using Layer-Wise Features from SSL Models28 Aug 2025
- 2025Keyword Spotting with Hyper-Matched Filters for Small Footprint Devices6 Aug 2025
- 2025AnalyticKWS: Towards Exemplar-Free Analytic Class Incremental Learning for Small-footprint Keyword Spotting17 May 2025
- 2025Adaptive Noise Resilient Keyword Spotting Using One-Shot Learning14 May 2025
12 newest of 41 All 41 (JSON)