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Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

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Re: Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

#11

Post by tcarnell »

I used to work for a company that built Speech Recognition systems and I came up with a similar/related idea - the idea being to take a load of videos of barack obama (for example), and create an accurate 'voice print'. Once done, any videos or speech could be scanned and if Barack Obama's voice print was recognized/detected, the recognizer could be tuned to his voice print AND could apply a set of appropriate grammars/vocabluary (for example the 'politics' grammar, or 'american' grammar or 'economics' grammar) - then you could very accurately perform speech recognition and automatically create text translations. Then when you google for text, you could actually retrieve videos whose content exactly matches the search terms and jump directly to that part of the video.

Over time you could build up a database of voice prints and grammars for not just celebrities, policitians, but also criminals (for automatic identification).

I had this idea almost 4 years ago, submitted it to the company, but it wasn't taken seriously.

If anybody is interested in this, let me know!

Re: Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

#12

Post by 0x12 »

mooism2 wrote: post #7

For the purposes of speech recognition, songs strike me as being particularly noisy .

That's a plus though, on the testing front. Once it works with random sections from songs that were not part of the training set that would be a significant improvement over what we have today.

The problem would be the disproportionate weights given to the words 'I', 'love', 'you', 'baby'. Songs are probably not the best training data when it comes to getting a well rounded vocabulary.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

#13

Post by eftpotrm »

Aside from issues relating to background noise on the soundtrack, the subtitles are frequently abridged from the spoken word in the interests of space and / or readability, so you'd need to account for that in your algorithm.

If it were me... Project Gutenberg has free books available in both audio and text formats. You may well again run into issues with the spoken and written text not exactly matching (it's not something I've looked into to know) but I wouldn't be surprised if it was rather less than what I've observed in subtitles, and the data concerned is in a more easily parsed format.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

#15

Post by josefresco »

tcarnell wrote: post #11

I used to work for a company that built Speech Recognition systems and I came up with a similar/related idea - the idea being to take a load of videos of barack obama (for example), and create an accurate 'voice print'. Once done, any videos or speech could be scanned and if Barack Obama's voice print was recognized/detected, the recognizer could be tuned to his voice print AND could apply a set of appropriate gramma…

Execute the idea for yourself. Good ideas are a dime-a-dozen.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

#16

Post by amirmc »

tcarnell wrote: post #11

I used to work for a company that built Speech Recognition systems and I came up with a similar/related idea - the idea being to take a load of videos of barack obama (for example), and create an accurate 'voice print'. Once done, any videos or speech could be scanned and if Barack Obama's voice print was recognized/detected, the recognizer could be tuned to his voice print AND could apply a set of appropriate gramma…

> when you google for text, you could actually retrieve videos whose content exactly matches the search terms and jump directly to that part of the video

The search aspect of this is very interesting and I hadn't thought of it before (though in hindsight it seems like an obvious benefit).

Re: Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

#17

Post by sycren »

hartror wrote: post #8
sycren wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about music lyrics?

For training speech recognition? Songs strikes me as poor training data. I wasn't arguing against movies, just that subtitles rather than a final script isn't the best data source.

well not exactly for speech recognition when it comes to entering text into a document but as spoken word to subtitle. I think there was a TED video that showed this somewhere..

Re: Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

#18

Post by sycren »

hartror wrote: post #8
sycren wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about music lyrics?

For training speech recognition? Songs strikes me as poor training data. I wasn't arguing against movies, just that subtitles rather than a final script isn't the best data source.

well not exactly for speech recognition when it comes to entering text into a document but as spoken word to subtitle. I think there was a TED video that showed this somewhere..

Re: Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

#19

Post by amirmc »

josefresco wrote: post #15
tcarnell wrote: post #11

I used to work for a company that built Speech Recognition systems and I came up with a similar/related idea - the idea being to take a load of videos of barack obama (for example), and create an accurate 'voice print'. Once done, any videos or speech could be scanned and if Barack Obama's voice print was recognized/detected, the recognizer could be tuned to his voice print AND could apply a set of appropriate gramma…

Execute the idea for yourself. Good ideas are a dime-a-dozen.

Off-topic: I understand your point but I've come to realise that good ideas are not a 'dime-a-dozen'. Mediocre ideas, maybe (although telling them apart is not necessarily obvious).

Re: Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

#20

Post by sycren »

amirmc wrote: post #19
josefresco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Execute the idea for yourself. Good ideas are a dime-a-dozen.

Off-topic: I understand your point but I've come to realise that good ideas are not a 'dime-a-dozen'. Mediocre ideas, maybe (although telling them apart is not necessarily obvious).

I would also say that with this particular idea, I have no idea whether you could data mine films and other media without having to pay some hefty licence fees that may perturb startups without enough funding.
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