Papers › Howl: A Deployed, Open-Source Wake Word Detection System
Howl: A Deployed, Open-Source Wake Word Detection System
Raphael Tang, Jaejun Lee, Afsaneh Razi, Julia Cambre, Ian Bicking, Jofish Kaye, Jimmy Lin
We describe Howl, an open-source wake word detection toolkit with native support for open speech datasets, like Mozilla Common Voice and Google Speech Commands. We report benchmark results on Speech Commands and our own freely available wake word detection dataset, built from MCV. We operationalize our system for Firefox Voice, a plugin enabling speech interactivity for the Firefox web browser. Howl represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully productionized yet open-source wake word detection toolkit with a web browser deployment target. Our codebase is at https://github.com/castorini/howl.
Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keyword Spotting | Google Speech Commands | res 8 | Google Speech Commands V1 12 | 97.8 | #4 of 42 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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