PromptKWS: A Novel Prompt-Guided Open-Vocabulary Keyword Spotting Framework

In this paper, we present PromptKWS, a novel Prompt-guided keyword spotting (KWS) framework to improve the accuracy of open vocabulary KWS systems. In specific terms, we introduce the Prompt Phrases Prediction Network (PPN), an encoder-decoder architecture designed to effectively extract keyword prompts embeddings. we employ the PPN encoder to encode the keyword prompts and infuse the prompt embedding into the Prompt-guided KWS encoder by utilizing a Prompt-acoustic Multi-head Cross-attention (MHCA). Experiments show that PromptKWS improves the wakeup rate by over 10% compared to baseline system. Notably, another strength of PromptKWS is its ability to effectively leverage keyword prompts for adapting to complex real-world environments involving noise and pronunciation variations. In comparison to purely acoustic models, which often struggle in such situations, PromptKWS demonstrates remarkable performance, with an average accuracy improvement of over 15% in test sets.