I think this more directly competes with the IBM Watson speech API, not Nuance?
Why? This is almost exactly what Nuance provides:
https://developer.nuance.com/public/index.php?task=memberSer...
Google opens access to its speech recognition API
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Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#12> To attract developers, the app will be free at launch with pricing to be introduced at a later date. Doesn't this mean you could spend time developing and building on the platform without knowing if your application is economically feasible? Seems like a huge risk to take for anything other than a hobby project.
That may just be poor phrasing by TechCrunch. It's entirely possible Google will announce the pricing on launch day, but not charge for some period of time so people have the ability to develop the initial apps without paying.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#13> To attract developers, the app will be free at launch with pricing to be introduced at a later date. Doesn't this mean you could spend time developing and building on the platform without knowing if your application is economically feasible? Seems like a huge risk to take for anything other than a hobby project.
If (for any reasonably probable value of final pricing) the cost of voice recognition is a material factor in determining whether the application is economically feasible, you have larger problems. In other words: if your application's economics are going to swing materially depending on how this is priced, it's probably not going to work out even if they keep it free.
Apps can involve users speaking for ten seconds making selections, or an hour getting transcribed. Right now, we don't know the order of magnitude; adding voice interaction to an app could be $.01/user/year or it could be $100/user/year.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#14> To attract developers, the app will be free at launch with pricing to be introduced at a later date. Doesn't this mean you could spend time developing and building on the platform without knowing if your application is economically feasible? Seems like a huge risk to take for anything other than a hobby project.
They did something very similar to this for their translate API. Realtime IRC client plugins that translated lines in foreign languages into yours in near-realtime went from "awesome" to "just kidding, nevermind" virtually overnight.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#15> To attract developers, the app will be free at launch with pricing to be introduced at a later date. Doesn't this mean you could spend time developing and building on the platform without knowing if your application is economically feasible? Seems like a huge risk to take for anything other than a hobby project.
I was really hoping they would post at least a preview of what the pricing will be. AppEngine pricing change resulted in a nasty surprise for a lot of people and a lot of vitriol towards Google. Just one article on this from many: http://readwrite.com/2011/09/02/google-app-engine-pricing-an... While the platform has moved way ahead of where it was in 2011, the memory of this is still in the back of people's mind and…
It is funny reading this in hindsight. We went straight to AWS, also for long running tcp connections, and never looked at it again. After that I have never recommended app engine.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#16This is HUGE in my opinion. Prior to this, in order to get near state-of-the-art speech recognition in your system/application you either had to have/hire expertise to build your own or pay Nuance a significant amount of money to use theirs. Nuance has always been a "big bad" company in my mind. If I recall correctly, they've sued many of their smaller competitors out of existence and only do expensive enterprise dea…
Has Google sued many of their smaller competitors out of business?
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#17I came across CMU Sphnix speech recognition library (http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net) that has a BSD-style license and they just released a big update last month. It supports embedded and remote speech recognition. Could be a nice alternative for someone who may not need all of the bells and whistles and prefers to have more control rather than relying on an API which may not be free for long.
Side note: if anyone is interested in helping with an embedded voice recognition project please ping me.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#18FWIW, Google followed the same strategy with Cloud Vision (iirc)..they released it in closed beta for a couple of months [0], then made it generally available with a pricing structure [1].
I've never used Nuance but I've played around with IBM Watson [2], which gives you 1000 free minutes a month, and then 2 cents a minute afterwards. Watson allows you to upload audio in 100MB chunks (or is it 10 minute chunks?, I forgot), whereas Google currently allows 2 minutes per request (edit: according to their signup page [5])...but both Watson and Google allow streaming so that's probably a non-issue for most developers.
From my non-scientific observation...Watson does pretty well, such that I would consider using it for quick, first-pass transcription...it even gets a surprising number of proper nouns correctly including "ProPublica" and "Ken Auletta" -- though fudges things in other cases...its vocab does not include "Theranos", which is variously transcribed as "their in house" and "their nose" [3]
It transcribed the "Trump Steaks" commercial nearly perfect...even getting the homophones in "when it comes to great steaks I just raise the stakes the sharper image is one of my favorite stores with fantastic products of all kinds that's why I'm thrilled they agree with me trump steaks are the world's greatest steaks and I mean that in every sense of the word and the sharper image is the only store where you can buy them"...though later on, it messed up "steak/stake" [4]
It didn't do as great a job on this Trump "Live Free or Die" commercial, possibly because of the booming theme music...I actually did a spot check with Google's API on this and while Watson didn't get "New Hampshire" at the beginning, Google did [4]. Judging by how well YouTube manages to caption videos of all sorts, I would say that Google probably has a strong lead in overall accuracy when it comes to audio in the wild, just based on the data it processes.
edit: fixed the Trump steaks transcription...Watson transcribed the first sentence correctly, but not the other "steaks"
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-offers-computer-vision...
[1] http://9to5google.com/2016/02/18/cloud-vision-api-beta-prici...
[2] https://github.com/dannguyen/watson-word-watcher
[3] https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/71d49ff62e9f9eb51ac6
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#19Anybody got the api docs yet? I wonder if I can stream from chrome via webrtc.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#20This is HUGE in my opinion. Prior to this, in order to get near state-of-the-art speech recognition in your system/application you either had to have/hire expertise to build your own or pay Nuance a significant amount of money to use theirs. Nuance has always been a "big bad" company in my mind. If I recall correctly, they've sued many of their smaller competitors out of existence and only do expensive enterprise dea…
Other "state-of-the-art" speech recognition solutions already exist.
For example, Microsoft has been offering it through its Project Oxford service.
https://www.projectoxford.ai/speech