Live data from Hacker News

Google opens access to its speech recognition API

social.techcrunch.com

41–50 of 173 posts

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#41
post #6
post #4

> 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…

Wasn't that five years ago? When it came out of preview (and prices were expected to change)?

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#42
post #38

Why isn't speech recognition just part of the OS? Like keyboard and mouse input.

Because speech recognition occurs on Google servers, not locally.

Speech recognition can occur either locally or on Google's servers. Since about 2012 [1], Android has been able to do some types of speech recognition, like dictation, on local devices. Additionally, Google Research has recently expanded on this functionality and it seems like much more of the speech recognition will be done locally [2].

[1] http://www.androidcentral.com/jelly-bean-brings-offline-voic...

[2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/always-on-google-ai-gives-andro...

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#43
post #10
post #4

> 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.

Only if you spend a huge amount of time integrating with their API. It won't be more expensive than Nuance, so prepare with their pricing in mind and you'll be fine ($.008 / transaction over 20k monthly transactions). https://developer.nuance.com/public/index.php?task=memberSer...

If you do any kind of volume with Nuance you get get pretty significant discounts.

On a past project, i think we got 45% off list without too much trouble.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#45
post #5

This 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…

If it's anything like Googles other APIs, people will build applications on top of it, and then Google will decide to shut down the API with no notice.

Fun to play with, but don't expect it to last...

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#46

"Google may choose to raise those prices over time, after it becomes the dominant player in the industry." ...Isn't that specifically what anticompetition laws were written to prevent?

As a developer I might be more worried about it not becoming at least amongst the dominant players because they might just drop it.

But maybe they only do that with consumer facing items?

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#47
post #30

Nice. But what I want is open-source speech recognition.

Like most machine-learning applications, the source code isn't the interesting part, the data is. Google started by training on millions of phrases from Google 411, and then they've been able to continue training anytime someone issues a voice command to an Android device. They have orders of magnitude more data than you could fit into a GitHub repository.

Couldn't you just download subtitles for old movies and train using those?

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#50
post #41
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wasn't that five years ago? When it came out of preview (and prices were expected to change)?

It was - 2011 is mentioned in both article and my comment.

I just wish Google wouldn't bring back memories of that by not disclosing pricing of a very promising API.

GAE has moved quite far ahead since then, but many people still won't consider it after the bad experience. Perceptions die hard...

Post reply on HN