Techniques for language independent wake-up word detection

A method for a user device, including receiving a first acoustic input of a user speaking a wake-up word in the target language; providing a first acoustic feature derived from the first acoustic input to an acoustic model stored on the user device to obtain a first sequence of speech units corresponding to the wake-up word spoken by the user in the target language, the acoustic model trained on a corpus of training data in a source language different than the target language; receiving a second acoustic input including the wake-up word in the target language; providing a second acoustic feature derived from the second acoustic input to the acoustic model to obtain a second sequence of speech units corresponding to the wake-up word in the target language; and comparing the first and second sequences of speech units to recognize the wake-up word in the target language.