We present Ambient Search, an open source system for displaying and retrieving relevant documents in real time for speech input. The system works ambiently, that is, it unobstructively listens to speech streams in the background, identifies keywords and keyphrases for query construction and continuously serves relevant documents from its index. Query terms are ranked with Word2Vec and TF-IDF and are continuously updated to allow for ongoing querying of a document collection. The retrieved documents, in our case Wikipedia articles, are visualized in real time in a browser interface. Our evaluation shows that Ambient Search compares favorably to another implicit information retrieval system on speech streams. Furthermore, we extrinsically evaluate multiword keyphrase generation, showing positive impact for manual transcriptions.

In this demonstration paper we describe Ambient Search, a system that displays and retrieves documents in real time based on speech input. The system operates continuously in ambient mode, i.e. it generates speech transcriptions and identifies main keywords and keyphrases, while also querying its index to display relevant documents without explicit query. Without user intervention, the results are dynamically updated; users can choose to interact with the system at any time, employing a conversation protocol that is enriched with the ambient information gathered continuously. Our evaluation shows that Ambient Search outperforms another implicit speech-based information retrieval system. Ambient search is available as open source software.