Background noise being recognized as text

I am using the standard python web socket server implementation (vosk-server/websockeet/asr_server.py). I am running with the (large) English model available from http://alphacephei.com/kaldi/vosk-model-en-us-0.22.zip. I am running at a 32k sampling rate. I am using the microphone in a set of ear buds to generate the speech so there is often some small spikes of background noise from this.

In general the recognition works well when there is speaking. However when there are pauses (testing with pauses of around 5 seconds or more) the recognizer frequently seems to interpet little bits of noise in the signal as the English word "the". Once this starts the sequence of partial results is often a stream of individual "the" words. When a final result is generated the recognized text often, but not always, starts with a "the" that was not actually spoken.

First, am I doing something wrong here? Sending long audio with pauses in the speech should work OK shouldn't it?

Second, if that's meant to work as I describe, then I think these are just corresponding to random noise which seems to sometimes be recognised as the English word "the". Is there a way I can play with trying to filtering these out? Would changing sample rate help at all?

FWIW, I have recorded some text on my Android device with the same setup using the standard (Google) Recorder app. The app sees little bits of noise but when I get a transcript it doesn't seem to add the odd "the" words.

Any suggestions welcome. Thanks for any help