  Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is a combination of deep learning with
reinforcement learning principles to create efficient methods that can learn by
interacting with its environment. This has led to breakthroughs in many complex
tasks, such as playing the game "Go", that were previously difficult to solve.
However, deep RL requires significant training time making it difficult to use
in various real-life applications such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). In
this paper, we study pre-training in deep RL to reduce the training time and
improve the performance of Speech Recognition, a popular application of HCI. To
evaluate the performance improvement in training we use the publicly available
"Speech Command" dataset, which contains utterances of 30 command keywords
spoken by 2,618 speakers. Results show that pre-training with deep RL offers
faster convergence compared to non-pre-trained RL while achieving improved
speech recognition accuracy.
