Age group classification and gender recognition from speech with temporal convolutional neural networks

Abstract

This paper analyses the performance of different types of Deep Neural Networks to jointly estimate age and identify gender from speech, to be applied in Interactive Voice Response systems available in call centres. Deep Neural Networks are used, because they have recently demonstrated discriminative and representation capabilities in a wide range of applications, including speech processing problems based on feature extraction and selection. Networks with different sizes are analysed to obtain information on how performance depends on the network architecture and the number of free parameters. The speech corpus used for the experiments is Mozilla’s Common Voice dataset, an open and crowdsourced speech corpus. The results are really good for gender classification, independently of the type of neural network, but improve with the network size. Regarding the classification by age groups, the combination of convolutional neural networks and temporal neural networks seems to be the best option among the analysed, and again, the larger the size of the network, the better the results. The results are promising for use in IVR systems, with the best systems achieving a gender identification error of less than 2% and a classification error by age group of less than 20%.