@inproceedings{3e7144e409c1429eae54f020d798b226,
title = "Voice localization using nearby wall reflections",
abstract = "Voice assistants such as Amazon Echo (Alexa) and Google Home use microphone arrays to estimate the angle of arrival (AoA) of the human voice. This paper focuses on adding user localization as a new capability to voice assistants. For any voice command, we desire Alexa to be able to localize the user inside the home. The core challenge is two-fold: (1) accurately estimating the AoAs of multipath echoes without the knowledge of the source signal, and (2) tracing back these AoAs to reverse triangulate the user's location. We develop VoLoc, a system that proposes an iterative align-and-cancel algorithm for improved multipath AoA estimation, followed by an error-minimization technique to estimate the geometry of a nearby wall reflection. The AoAs and geometric parameters of the nearby wall are then fused to reveal the user's location. Under modest assumptions, we report localization accuracy of 0.44 m across different rooms, clutter, and user/microphone locations. VoLoc runs in near real-time but needs to hear around 15 voice commands before becoming operational.",
keywords = "Amazon alexa, acoustic reverberation, angle-of-arrival, edge computing, microphone array, smart home, source localization, voice assistant",
author = "Sheng Shen and Daguan Chen and Wei, {Yu Lin} and Zhijian Yang and Choudhury, {Romit Roy}",
note = "Funding Information: We sincerely thank the anonymous shepherd and reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Samsung, Intel, Google, Qualcomm, HP, and NSF (grant CNS-1719337 and CNS-1910933) for partially funding this research. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 ACM.; 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom 2020 ; Conference date: 21-09-2020 Through 25-09-2020",
year = "2020",
month = apr,
day = "16",
doi = "10.1145/3372224.3380884",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Proceedings of the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MOBICOM",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
pages = "82--95",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom 2020",
address = "United States",
}