Indian EmoSpeech Command Dataset: A dataset for emotion based speech recognition in the wild

Abstract: Speech emotion analysis is an important task which further enables several application use cases. The non-verbal sounds within speech utterances also play a pivotal role in emotion analysis in speech. Due to the widespread use of smartphones, it becomes viable to analyze speech commands captured using microphones for emotion understanding by utilizing on-device machine learning models. The non-verbal information includes the environment background sounds describing the type of surroundings, current situation and activities being performed. In this work, we consider both verbal (speech commands) and non-verbal sounds (background noises) within an utterance for emotion analysis in real-life scenarios. We create an indigenous dataset for this task namely "Indian EmoSpeech Command Dataset". It contains keywords with diverse emotions and background sounds, presented to explore new challenges in audio analysis. We exhaustively compare with various baseline models for emotion analysis on speech commands on several performance metrics. We demonstrate that we achieve a significant average gain of 3.3% in top-one score over a subset of speech command dataset for keyword spotting.