The Effect of Different Occupational Background Noises on Voice Recognition Accuracy

Abstract

Voice recognition has become an integral part of our lives, commonly used in call centers and as part of virtual assistants. However, voice recognition is increasingly applied to more industrial uses. Each of these use cases has unique characteristics that may impact the effectiveness of voice recognition, which could impact industrial productivity, performance, or even safety. One of the most prominent among them is the unique background noises that are dominant in each industry. The existence of different machinery and different work layouts are primary contributors to this. Another important characteristic is the type of communication that is present in these settings. Daily communication often involves longer sentences uttered under relatively silent conditions, whereas communication in industrial settings is often short and conducted in loud conditions. In this study, we demonstrated the importance of taking these two elements into account by comparing the performances of two voice recognition algorithms under several background noise conditions: a regular Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based voice recognition algorithm to an Auto Speech Recognition (ASR)-based model with a denoising module. Our results indicate that there is a significant performance drop between the typical background noise use (white noise) and the rest of the background noises. Also, our custom ASR model with the denoising module outperformed the CNN-based model with an overall performance increase between 14–35% across all background noises. Both results give proof that specialized voice recognition algorithms need to be developed for these environments to reliably deploy them as control mechanisms.