  Large scale machine learning (ML) systems such as the Alexa automatic speech
recognition (ASR) system continue to improve with increasing amounts of
manually transcribed training data. Instead of scaling manual transcription to
impractical levels, we utilize semi-supervised learning (SSL) to learn acoustic
models (AM) from the vast firehose of untranscribed audio data. Learning an AM
from 1 Million hours of audio presents unique ML and system design challenges.
We present the design and evaluation of a highly scalable and resource
efficient SSL system for AM. Employing the student/teacher learning paradigm,
we focus on the student learning subsystem: a scalable and robust data pipeline
that generates features and targets from raw audio, and an efficient model
pipeline, including the distributed trainer, that builds a student model. Our
evaluations show that, even without extensive hyper-parameter tuning, we obtain
relative accuracy improvements in the 10 to 20$\%$ range, with higher gains in
noisier conditions. The end-to-end processing time of this SSL system was 12
days, and several components in this system can trivially scale linearly with
more compute resources.
