Open vocabulary keyword spotting is a crucial and challenging task in automatic speech recognition (ASR) that focuses on detecting user-defined keywords within a spoken utterance. Keyword spotting methods commonly map the audio utterance and keyword into a joint embedding space to obtain some affinity score. In this work, we propose AdaKWS, a novel method for keyword spotting in which a text encoder is trained to output keyword-conditioned normalization parameters. These parameters are used to process the auditory input. We provide an extensive evaluation using challenging and diverse multi-lingual benchmarks and show significant improvements over recent keyword spotting and ASR baselines. Furthermore, we study the effectiveness of our approach on low-resource languages that were unseen during the training. The results demonstrate a substantial performance improvement compared to baseline methods.
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