Google opens access to its speech recognition API • Hacker News Board

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#61

Post by danso » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #47

nostrademons wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There aren't many old movies (in the public domain) that are subtitled and/or have good audio... However, in the U.S., we have a huge amount of government audio/video that is captioned. Here's an example of using youtube-dl to download one of President Obama's speeches and extract the closed captions (which I believe are produced by the government) into its own VTT file:

https://asciinema.org/a/93ihv5er83mrpihh9i5m3s9o5

Congress has video for all of its sessions and it is transcribed. So does the Supreme Court (though not timestamped).

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#62

Post by hans » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 11:05 PM UTC

cool, next up is a way to tweak the speech API to recognize patterns in stocks and capex .. wasn't that what Renaissance Technologies did ?

really GooG should democratize quant stuff next .. diy hedge fund algos.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#63

Post by chair-law » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 11:12 PM UTC

What is the difference from a speech recognition API and [NLP libraries](https://opennlp.apache.org/)? This information was not easily found with a few google searches, so I figured others might have the same question.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#64

Post by spdustin » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 11:21 PM UTC

halfmoth wrote: post #60

Will be interesting to compare with http://www.speechmatics.com

There's no hint of pricing that I could find on their page. Do you know about their pricing model?

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#65

Post by vonsydov » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 11:22 PM UTC

nuance is the new blackberry

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#66

Post by robohamburger » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 11:34 PM UTC

Unless I have gone crazy google has had a STT available to tinker with for awhile. It is one of the options for jasper [1]. Hopefully this means it will be easier to setup now.

Would be nice if they just open sourced it though but I imagine that is at crossed purposes with their business.

[1] https://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/configuration/

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#67

Post by blennon » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 11:35 PM UTC

hardwaresofton wrote: post #25

BorisEm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also, CMUSphinx and Julius: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php It is amazingly easy to create speech recognition without going out to any API these days.

Is Julius really state-of-the-art? Looks like they use n-gram and HMMs. Those were the methods that achieve SotA 5+ years ago. My understanding is that Google and Microsoft are using end-to-end (or nearly) neural network models; these outperformed the older methods a few years ago. Not sure how CMUSphinx works under the hood.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#68

Post by discardedrefuse » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 11:42 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #56

zkirill wrote: post #17

I 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…

There is a project for Rapberry Pi to use Sphinx to roll your own Amazon Echo like device. You might want to take a look at that.

Mycroft https://mycroft.ai/

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#69

Post by simcop2387 » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 11:42 PM UTC

ytjohn wrote: post #36

hardwaresofton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, CMUSphinx and Julius: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php It is amazingly easy to create speech recognition without going out to any API these days.

I first learned about CMUSphinx from the [Jasper Project]( https://jasperproject.github.io/ ). While Jasper provided an image for the Pi, I decided to go ahead and make a scripted install of CMUSphinx. I spent something like 2 frustrating days attempting to get it installed by hand in a repeatable fashion before giving up. This was 2 years ago, so maybe it's simple now, but I didn't find it "amazingly easy" back then…

That sounds like my experience with it from about 5 years ago or so. I gave up on it also. It also didn't help that CMUSphinx has had more than one version in development in different languages.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#70

Post by alfonsodev » Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 11:43 PM UTC

I'm reading many libraries here, I wonder what's the best open and multi platform software for spech recognition to code with vim, Atom etc. I only saw a hybrid system working with dragon + Python on Windows. I would like to train/ customize my own system since I'm starting to have pain in tendons, and wrists. Do you think this Google Api can make it? Not being local looks like a limiting factor for speed, lag.