Dr.Vikram Vij, Senior Vice President, Head of Voice Intelligence Team, Samsung Research India – Bangalore (SRIB) will share the journey that Samsung has undertaken in developing its Voice Assistant Bixby and particularly Automatic Speech Recognition(ASR) system that powers it. ASR is one of the complex engines that power modern virtual Assistants. Several independent components such as pre-processors (Acoustic Echo Cancellation, Noise Suppression, Neural Beam forming and so on), Wake word detectors, End-point detectors, Hybrid Decoders, Inverse Text Normalizers work together to make a complete ASR system. We are in an exciting period with tremendous advancements made in recent times. The development of End-to-End(E2E) ASR systems is one such advancement that has boosted recognition accuracy significantly and it has the potential to make speech recognition ubiquitous by fitting completely On-Device thereby bringing down the latency and cost and addressing the privacy concerns of the users. Samsung, the largest device maker on the planet, envisions a huge value in bringing Bixby to a variety of existing devices and new devices such as Social Robots, which throws many technical challenges particularly in making the ASR very robust. In this talk, Dr.Vikram is excited to present the cutting-edge technologies that his team is developing - Far-Field Speech Recognition, E2E ASR, Whisper Detection, Contextual End-Point Detection (EPD), On-device ASR and so on. He would also elaborate on the research activities his team is relentlessly pursuing.