Crate wavekat_vad 

WaveKat VAD — Unified voice activity detection with multiple backends.

This crate provides a common VoiceActivityDetector trait with implementations for different VAD backends, enabling experimentation and benchmarking across technologies.

Backends

Backend	Feature	Sample Rates	Frame Size	Output
WebRTC	webrtc (default)	8/16/32/48 kHz	10, 20, or 30ms	Binary (0.0 or 1.0)
Silero	silero	8/16 kHz	32ms	Continuous (0.0–1.0)
TEN-VAD	ten-vad	16 kHz only	16ms	Continuous (0.0–1.0)
FireRedVAD	firered	16 kHz only	10ms	Continuous (0.0–1.0)

Quick start

Add the crate with the backend you need:

[dependencies]
wavekat-vad = "0.1"                                  # WebRTC only (default)
wavekat-vad = { version = "0.1", features = ["silero"] }  # Silero
wavekat-vad = { version = "0.1", features = ["ten-vad"] } # TEN-VAD
wavekat-vad = { version = "0.1", features = ["firered"] } # FireRedVAD

Then create a detector and process audio frames:

use wavekat_vad::VoiceActivityDetector;
use wavekat_vad::backends::webrtc::{WebRtcVad, WebRtcVadMode};

let mut vad = WebRtcVad::new(16000, WebRtcVadMode::Quality).unwrap();
let samples = vec![0i16; 480]; // 30ms at 16kHz
let probability = vad.process(&samples, 16000).unwrap();
println!("Speech probability: {probability}");

Writing backend-generic code

All backends implement VoiceActivityDetector, so you can write code that works with any backend:

use wavekat_vad::VoiceActivityDetector;

fn detect_speech(vad: &mut dyn VoiceActivityDetector, audio: &[i16], sample_rate: u32) {
    let caps = vad.capabilities();
    for frame in audio.chunks_exact(caps.frame_size) {
        let prob = vad.process(frame, sample_rate).unwrap();
        if prob > 0.5 {
            println!("Speech detected!");
        }
    }
}

Handling arbitrary chunk sizes

Real-world audio often arrives in chunks that don’t match the backend’s required frame size. Use FrameAdapter to buffer and split automatically:

use wavekat_vad::FrameAdapter;
use wavekat_vad::backends::webrtc::{WebRtcVad, WebRtcVadMode};

let vad = WebRtcVad::new(16000, WebRtcVadMode::Quality).unwrap();
let mut adapter = FrameAdapter::new(Box::new(vad));

let chunk = vec![0i16; 1000]; // arbitrary size
let results = adapter.process_all(&chunk, 16000).unwrap();
for prob in &results {
    println!("{prob:.3}");
}

Audio preprocessing

Optional preprocessing stages can improve accuracy with noisy input. See the preprocessing module for details.

use wavekat_vad::preprocessing::{Preprocessor, PreprocessorConfig};

let config = PreprocessorConfig::raw_mic(); // 80Hz HP + normalization
let mut preprocessor = Preprocessor::new(&config, 16000);
let raw: Vec<i16> = vec![0; 512];
let cleaned = preprocessor.process(&raw);
// feed `cleaned` to your VAD

Feature flags

Feature	Default	Description
webrtc	Yes	WebRTC VAD backend
silero	No	Silero VAD backend (ONNX model downloaded at build time)
ten-vad	No	TEN-VAD backend (ONNX model downloaded at build time)
firered	No	FireRedVAD backend (ONNX model + CMVN downloaded at build time)
denoise	No	RNNoise-based noise suppression in preprocessing
serde	No	Serialize/Deserialize for config types

ONNX model downloads

The Silero, TEN-VAD, and FireRedVAD backends download their ONNX models automatically at build time. The Silero backend is pinned to v6.2.1 by default.

For offline or CI builds, set environment variables to point to local model files:

SILERO_MODEL_PATH=/path/to/silero_vad.onnx cargo build --features silero
TEN_VAD_MODEL_PATH=/path/to/ten-vad.onnx cargo build --features ten-vad
FIRERED_MODEL_PATH=/path/to/model.onnx FIRERED_CMVN_PATH=/path/to/cmvn.ark cargo build --features firered

To use a different Silero model version, override the download URL:

SILERO_MODEL_URL=https://github.com/snakers4/silero-vad/raw/v6.0/src/silero_vad/data/silero_vad.onnx cargo build --features silero

Error handling

All backends return Result<f32, VadError>. Check a backend’s requirements with VoiceActivityDetector::capabilities() before processing:

• VadError::InvalidSampleRate — unsupported sample rate
• VadError::InvalidFrameSize — wrong number of samples
• VadError::BackendError — backend-specific error (e.g. ONNX failure)

Examples

Runnable examples are in the examples/ directory:

• detect_speech — Detect speech in a WAV file using any backend
• ten_vad_file — Process a WAV file with TEN-VAD directly

cargo run --example detect_speech -- audio.wav
cargo run --example detect_speech --features silero -- -b silero audio.wav
cargo run --example ten_vad_file --features ten-vad -- audio.wav

TEN-VAD model license

The TEN-VAD ONNX model is licensed under Apache-2.0 with a non-compete clause by the TEN-framework / Agora. It restricts deployment that competes with Agora’s offerings. Review the TEN-VAD license before using in production.

Re-exports

pub use adapter::FrameAdapter;

pub use error::VadError;

Modules

adapter

Frame adapter for matching audio frames to VAD backend requirements.

backends

VAD backend implementations.

error

frame

preprocessing

Audio preprocessing pipeline for improving VAD accuracy.

Structs

ProcessTimings

Accumulated processing time breakdown by named pipeline stage.

VadCapabilities

Describes the audio requirements of a VAD backend.

Traits

VoiceActivityDetector

Common interface for voice activity detection backends.