A prosody-based approach to end-of-utterance detection that does not require speech recognition

In previous work we showed that state-of-the-art end-of-utterance detection (as used, for example, in dialog systems) can be improved significantly by making use of prosodic and/or language models that predict utterance endpoints, based on word and alignment output from a speech recognizer. However, using a recognizer in endpointing might not be practical in certain applications. In this paper we demonstrate that the improvements due to the prosodic knowledge can be realized largely without alignment information, i.e., without requiring a speech recognizer. A prosodic end-of-utterance detector using only speech/nonspeech detection output is still considerably more accurate and has lower latency than a baseline system based on pause-length thresholding.