Abstract: A system may be configured to detect custom acoustic events, where the system generates an acoustic event profile for the custom acoustic event based on a natural language description provided by a user and using an audio sample of the described acoustic event. For example, the user may describe the custom acoustic event as “dog bark.” The system may ask the user questions to refine the description (e.g., dog breed, dog gender, age, etc.). Using an audio sample of the refined description, the system may then determine that audio captured in the user's environment is a potential sample of the custom acoustic event. Such captured audio may be presented to the user for confirmation, and then may be used to detect future occurrences of the custom acoustic event in the user's environment.