Paper ID: 2308.03905

Intelligent Assistant Language Understanding On Device

Cecilia Aas, Hisham Abdelsalam, Irina Belousova, Shruti Bhargava, Jianpeng Cheng, Robert Daland, Joris Driesen, Federico Flego, Tristan Guigue, Anders Johannsen, Partha Lal, Jiarui Lu, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Nathan Perkins, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Stephen Pulman, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, David Q. Sun, John Torr, Marco Del Vecchio, Jay Wacker, Jason D. Williams, Hong Yu

It has recently become feasible to run personal digital assistants on phones and other personal devices. In this paper we describe a design for a natural language understanding system that runs on device. In comparison to a server-based assistant, this system is more private, more reliable, faster, more expressive, and more accurate. We describe what led to key choices about architecture and technologies. For example, some approaches in the dialog systems literature are difficult to maintain over time in a deployment setting. We hope that sharing learnings from our practical experiences may help inform future work in the research community.

Submitted: Aug 7, 2023