In this paper, we investigate how to optimize the vocabulary for a voice search language model. The metric we optimize over is the out-of-vocabulary (OoV) rate since it is a strong indicator of user experience. In a departure from the usual way of measuring OoV rates, web search logs allow us to compute the per-session OoV rate and thus estimate the percentage of users that experience a given OoV rate. Under very conservative text normalization, we find that a voice search vocabulary consisting of 2 to 2.5M words extracted from 1 week of search query data will result in an aggregate OoV rate of 0.01; at that size, the same OoV rate will also be experienced by 90 % of users. The number of words included in the vocabulary is a stable indicator of the OoV rate. Altering the freshness of the vocabulary or the duration of the time window over which the training data is gathered does not significantly change the OoV rate. Surprisingly, a significantly larger vocabulary (approx. 10 million words) is required to guarantee OoV rates below 0.01 (1%) for 95 % of the users. Index Terms: speech recognition, voice search, vocabulary estimation, training data selection

Large language models have been proven quite beneficial for a variety of automatic speech recognition tasks in Google. We summarize results on Voice Search and a few YouTube speech transcription tasks to highlight the impact that one can expect from increasing both the amount of training data, and the size of the language model estimated from such data. Depending on the task, availability and amount of training data used, language model size and amount of work and care put into integrating them in the lattice rescoring step we observe reductions in word error rate between 6 % and 10 % relative, for systems on a wide range of operating points between 17 % and 52 % word error rate. I.