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Very true. Which is why all the home assistants (Google Home, Amazon Echo etc) use array mics and beamforming - they get a much cleaner speech signal from far field audio, and better WER as a result

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Exactly. This is also why Google sponsors the CHiME challenge, the existence of which is more proof that ASR is pretty far from solved.

http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/

Good stuff. Was looking into cheap array mics with linux drivers a few times in the past but not much is available.

Speech separation - Mitsubishi Research has done some pretty impressive stuff on that - http://www.merl.com/demos/deep-clustering. Haven't seen equivalents of that in open source ASR

Totally. You may want to take a look at the papers from CHiME4 for more along those lines:

http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/chime2016/resul...

I'm really fascinated by the whole idea of blind source separation and the fact that speech signals are "sparse" in frequency space.

We've had a similar experience looking for hardware / open source beamforming. There's a package called beamformit, but I think it's pretty old.

This is the useful info I've seen hardware-wise recently:

https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-microphone-arrays-r...

https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-voice-service/dev-kits/co...

Amazon's 7-mic hardware has its own OEM program.

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