Abstract: A method for generating a comfort noise (CN) parameter is provided. The method includes receiving an audio input; detecting, with a Voice Activity Detector (VAD), a current inactive segment in the audio input; as a result of detecting, with the VAD, the current inactive segment in the audio input, calculating a CN parameter CNused; and providing the CN parameter CNused to a decoder. The CN parameter CNused is calculated based at least in part on the current inactive segment and a previous inactive segment.

Abstract: A system and method for assisted-learning with a portable computing device that includes converting an audio file into text, parsing the text to determine that a user is requesting information regarding a place of interest, in response to determining that the user is requesting information regarding the place of interest: obtaining a geographical location of the portable computing device, activating a camera of the portable computing device to capture one or more images of a surrounding, analyzing the one or more images using a visual recognition engine in combination with the geographical location to identify the place of interest, determining that an interactive option is available for the place of interest, and instructing the portable computing device to audibly output the interactive option to the user along with information about the place of interest.

Abstract: Methods and systems are presented for translating informal utterances into formal texts. Informal utterances may include words in abbreviation forms or typographical errors. The informal utterances may be processed by mapping each word in an utterance into a well-defined token. The mapping from the words to the tokens may be based on a context associated with the utterance derived by analyzing the utterance in a character-by-character basis. The token that is mapped for each word can be one of a vocabulary token that corresponds to a formal word in a pre-defined word corpus, an unknown token that corresponds to an unknown word, or a masked token. Formal text may then be generated based on the mapped tokens. Through the processing of informal utterances using the techniques disclosed herein, the informal utterances are both normalized and sanitized.

Abstract: A method includes receiving audio data encoding an utterance, processing, using a speech recognition model, the audio data to generate speech recognition scores for speech elements, and determining context scores for the speech elements based on context data indicating a context for the utterance. The method also includes executing, using the speech recognition scores and the context scores, a beam search decoding process to determine one or more candidate transcriptions for the utterance. The method also includes selecting a transcription for the utterance from the one or more candidate transcriptions.

Abstract: Implementations can receive audio data corresponding to a spoken utterance of a user, process the audio data to generate a plurality of speech hypotheses, determine an action to be performed by an automated assistant based on the speech hypotheses, and cause the computing device to render an indication of the action. In response to the computing device rendering the indication, implementations can receive additional audio data corresponding to an additional spoken utterance of the user, process the additional audio data to determine that a portion of the spoken utterance is similar to an additional portion of the additional spoken utterance, supplant the action with an alternate action, and cause the automated assistant to initiate performance of the alternate action. Some implementations can determine whether to render the indication of the action based on a confidence level associated with the action.