The two most common ways to activate intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) are button presses and trigger phrases. This paper describes a new way to invoke IVAs on smartwatches: simply raise your hand and speak naturally. To achieve this experience, we designed an accurate, low-power detector that works on a wide range of environments and activity scenarios with minimal impact to battery life, memory footprint, and processor utilization. The raise to speak (RTS) detector consists of four main compo- nents: an on-device gesture convolutional neural network (CNN) that uses accelerometer data to detect specific poses; an on-device speech CNN to detect proximal human speech; a policy model to combine signals from the motion and speech detector; and an off-device false trigger mitigation (FTM) system to reduce unin- tentional invocations trigged by the on-device detector. Majority of the components of the detector run on-device to preserve user privacy. The RTS detector was released in watchOS 5.0 and is running on millions of devices worldwide.

In this paper, we present a purpose-built data management system, MLdp, for all machine learning (ML) datasets. ML applications pose some unique requirements different from common conventional data processing applications, including but not limited to: data lineage and provenance tracking, rich data semantics and formats, integration with diverse ML frameworks and access patterns, trial-and-error driven data exploration and evolution, rapid experimentation, reproducibility of the model training, strict compliance and privacy regulations, etc. Current ML systems/services, often named MLaaS, to-date focus on the ML algorithms, and offer no integrated data management system. Instead, they require users to bring their own data and to manage their own data on either blob storage or on file systems. The burdens of data management tasks, such as versioning and access control, fall onto the users, and not all compliance features, such as terms of use, privacy measures, and auditing, are available. MLdp offers a minimalist and flexible data model for all varieties of data, strong version management to guarantee re-producibility of ML experiments, and integration with major ML frameworks. MLdp also maintains the data provenance to help users track lineage and dependencies among data versions and models in their ML pipelines. In addition to table-stake features, such as security, availability and scalability, MLdp's internal design choices are strongly influenced by the goal to support rapid ML experiment iterations, which cycle through data discovery, data exploration, feature engineering, model training, model evaluation, and back to data discovery. The contributions of this paper are: 1) to recognize the needs and to call out the requirements of an ML data platform, 2) to share our experiences in building MLdp by adopting existing database technologies to the new problem as well as by devising new solutions, and 3) to call for actions from our communities on future challenges.