17. The electronic device of claim 16 , further comprising: a comparator to receive the posterior distribution of voice activity, to apply a criterion for selecting an optimal sequence based on the posterior distribution of voice activity, and to generate a Voice Activity Detection (VAD) output that indicates whether the acoustic signal includes speech.
19. The electronic device of claim 17 , wherein the inference generator operates with a look-ahead latency (t+L) that allows the VAD to make a decision at time t using information up to look ahead (t+L).