Speech Technology

Technical deep-dives into speech and audio ML systems, from research foundations to production deployment. Covers ASR, TTS, speaker recognition, and conversational AI with both theoretical insights and practical engineering.

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From fundamentals to the production frontier:

Each post includes:

  • Architecture and model design choices
  • Streaming and real-time processing considerations
  • Research foundations and recent advances
  • Production deployment and optimization strategies
  • Scaling, cost analysis, and performance tuning
  • Code examples and implementation details

Browse by Topic

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR):

Speech Classification:

Privacy & On-Device:

Audio Processing:

Real-time Processing:

Text-to-Speech (TTS):

Speaker Technology:

Speech Separation:

Pipeline Optimization:

Conversational AI:

Security & Abuse:

Model Optimization:

Speech MLOps:

Adaptive Systems:

Speech Model Design:

Transfer Learning & Domain Adaptation:

Model Deployment:

Search & Retrieval:

Pipeline Orchestration:

Speech Tech Index

Below you’ll find all speech technology posts in chronological order:

Content created with the assistance of large language models and reviewed for technical accuracy.

Streaming ASR Architecture

24 minute read

Why batch ASR won’t work for voice assistants, and how streaming models transcribe speech as you speak in under 200ms.

Speech Command Classification

30 minute read

How voice assistants recognize “turn on the lights” from raw audio in under 100ms without full ASR transcription.

Voice Activity Detection (VAD)

25 minute read

How voice assistants and video conferencing apps detect when you’re speaking vs silence, the critical first step in every speech pipeline.

Speaker Recognition & Verification

23 minute read

How voice assistants recognize who’s speaking, the biometric authentication powering “Hey Alexa” and personalized experiences.

Streaming Speech Processing Pipeline

25 minute read

Build real-time speech processing pipelines that handle audio streams with minimal latency for live transcription and voice interfaces.

Real-time Keyword Spotting

26 minute read

Build lightweight models that detect specific keywords in audio streams with minimal latency and power consumption for voice interfaces.

Voice Enhancement & Noise Reduction

29 minute read

Build systems that enhance voice quality by removing noise, improving intelligibility, and optimizing audio for speech applications.

Speech Separation

24 minute read

Separate overlapping speakers with 99%+ accuracy: Deep learning solves the cocktail party problem for meeting transcription and voice assistants.

Multi-Speaker ASR

27 minute read

Build production multi-speaker ASR systems: Combine speech recognition, speaker diarization, and overlap handling for real-world conversations.

Multi-model Speech Ensemble

25 minute read

Build production speech systems that combine multiple ASR/TTS models using backtracking-based selection strategies to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy.

Speaker Clustering (Diarization)

23 minute read

Build production speaker diarization systems that cluster audio segments by speaker using embedding-based similarity and hash-based grouping.

Real-time Audio Segmentation

23 minute read

Build production audio segmentation systems that detect boundaries in real-time using interval merging and temporal processing, the same principles from merg...

Distributed Speech Training

13 minute read

Design distributed training pipelines for large-scale speech models that efficiently handle hundreds of thousands of hours of sequential audio data.

Audio Augmentation Techniques

11 minute read

Use audio augmentation techniques to make speech models robust to noise, accents, channels, and real-world conditions, built on the same matrix/tensor transf...

Speech Experiment Management

18 minute read

Design experiment management systems tailored for speech research, tracking audio data, models, metrics, and multi-dimensional experiments at scale.

Adaptive Speech Models

22 minute read

Design adaptive speech models that adjust in real-time to speakers, accents, noise, and domains, using the same greedy adaptation strategy as Jump Game and o...

Speech Architecture Search

19 minute read

Design neural architecture search systems for speech models that automatically discover optimal ASR/TTS architectures, using dynamic programming and path opt...

Cost-efficient Speech Systems

15 minute read

Strategies for building profitable speech recognition systems by optimizing the entire pipeline from signal processing to hardware.

ASR Beam Search Implementation

14 minute read

Implementing the core decoding logic of modern Speech Recognition systems, handling alignment, blanks, and language models.

Speech Tokenization

17 minute read

The breakthrough that allows us to treat audio like text, enabling GPT-style models for speech.

End-to-End Speech Model Design

25 minute read

Goodbye HMMs. Goodbye Phonemes. Goodbye Lexicons. We are teaching the machine to Listen, Attend, and Spell.

Voice Search Ranking

24 minute read

“Play Call Me Maybe”. Did you mean the song, the video, or the contact named ‘Maybe’?

Social Voice Networks

16 minute read

“Building recommendation and moderation systems for voice-based social platforms.”

Phonetic Search in Speech

12 minute read

“Finding ‘Jon’ when the user types ‘John’, or ‘Symphony’ when they say ‘Simfoni’.”

Speech Enhancement

15 minute read

“Extracting clear speech from the noise of the real world.”

Cross-Lingual Speech Transfer

9 minute read

“If you know how to pronounce ‘P’ in English, you’re 90% of the way to pronouncing ‘P’ in Portuguese.”

Speech Model Export

7 minute read

“A model that runs in a Jupyter notebook is an experiment. A model that runs on an iPhone is a product.”

Phonetic Trie

7 minute read

“Spelling is irrelevant. Sound is everything.”

Custom Language Modeling

6 minute read

“The model knows ‘Apple’ the fruit. It needs to learn ‘Apple’ the stock ticker.”

Privacy-preserving Speech

23 minute read

“Speech is biometric. Treat every waveform like a password, design systems that learn without listening.”

Speech Anomaly Detection

22 minute read

“If ASR is the brain, anomaly detection is the nervous system, it tells you when the audio reality changed.”

Audio Quality Validation

20 minute read

“If you don’t validate audio, you’ll debug ‘model regressions’ that are really microphone bugs.”

Acoustic Pattern Matching

24 minute read

“Acoustic pattern matching is search, except your ‘strings’ are waveforms and your distance metric is learned.”

Neural Architecture Search for Speech

19 minute read

“Speech models are uniquely sensitive to temporal resolution. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is the science of finding the perfect balance between time, fr...

Real-time Voice Adaptation

9 minute read

“A speech model that doesn’t adapt is like a listener who doesn’t pay attention to who is speaking. Voice adaptation is about moving from ‘Universal Speech’ ...

Architecting Conversational AI Systems

6 minute read

“A voice assistant is more than a speech recognizer attached to a search engine. It is a stateful entity that must navigate the social nuances of human turn-...

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for Speech

7 minute read

“Hand-crafting speech architectures is reaching its limits. For the next generation of voice assistants, we don’t build the model, we define the search space...

Multi-tier Speech Caching Architecture

19 minute read

“Speech models are computationally the most expensive per byte of input. Multi-tier caching is the only way to scale voice assistants to millions of users wi...