A method of detecting a cough in an audio stream includes a step of performing one or more pre-processing steps on the audio stream to generate an input audio sequence comprising a plurality of time-separated audio segments. An embedding is generated by a self-supervised triplet loss embedding model for each of the segments of the input audio sequence using an audio feature set, the embedding model having been trained to learn the audio feature set in a self-supervised triplet loss manner from a plurality of speech audio clips from a speech dataset. The embedding for each of the segments is provided to a model performing cough detection inference. This model generates a probability that each of the segments of the input audio sequence includes a cough episode. The method includes generating cough metrics for each of the cough episodes detected in the input audio sequence.