1SPU: 1-step Speech Processing Unit

Recent studies have made some progress in refining end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition encoders by applying Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss to enhance named entity recognition within transcriptions. However, these methods have been constrained by their exclusive use of the ASCII character set, allowing only a limited array of semantic labels. We propose 1SPU, a 1-step Speech Processing Unit which can recognize speech events (e.g: speaker change) or an NL event (Intent, Emotion) while also transcribing vocal content. It extends the E2E automatic speech recognition (ASR) system's vocabulary by adding a set of unused placeholder symbols, conceptually akin to the <pad> tokens used in sequence modeling. These placeholders are then assigned to represent semantic events (in form of tags) and are integrated into the transcription process as distinct tokens. We demonstrate notable improvements on the SLUE benchmark and yields results that are on par with those for the SLURP dataset. Additionally, we provide a visual analysis of the system's proficiency in accurately pinpointing meaningful tokens over time, illustrating the enhancement in transcription quality through the utilization of supplementary semantic tags.

Trustera: A Live Conversation Redaction System

Trustera, the first functional system that redacts personally identifiable information (PII) in real-time spoken conversations to remove agents' need to hear sensitive information while preserving the naturalness of live customer-agent conversations. As opposed to post-call redaction, audio masking starts as soon as the customer begins speaking to a PII entity. This significantly reduces the risk of PII being intercepted or stored in insecure data storage. Trustera's architecture consists of a pipeline of automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, and a live audio redactor module. The system's goal is three-fold: redact entities that are PII, mask the audio that goes to the agent, and at the same time capture the entity, so that the captured PII can be used for a payment transaction or caller identification. Trustera is currently being used by thousands of agents to secure customers' sensitive information.