Houndify launched last year and provides both speech recognition and natural language understanding. They have a free plan that never expires and transparent pricing. It can handle very complex queries that Google can't.
Google opens access to its speech recognition API
101–110 of 173 posts
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#102I 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…
Tried it for a project, decent for english, but the support for non-english languages is not there
The website says they provide language models for "many languages".
When did you try it and which languages? Any particular issues you can share?
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#103[deleted]
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#104I would say that Google's main goal here is in expanding their training data set, as opposed to creating a new revenue stream. If it hurts competitors (e.g. Nuance) that might only be a side-effect of that main objective, and likely they will not aim to hurt the competition intentionally. As others here have pointed out, the value now for GOOG is in building the best training data-set in the business, as opposed to j…
Question from a machine learning noob: how would they use an unlabeled dataset for training? Would Google employees listen to it all (if the ToS would even allow that) and transscribe it, then use the result for training? Or is there another way to make it useful without being labeled?
I doubt that using their customers' audio as training data was a major motivation for offering this service.
But, assuming that was their plan, they'd have a couple options:
- Like you said, they could turn it into supervised training examples by transcribing it. I'm sure they'd at least like to transcribe some of it so that they can measure their performance. Also, while Google does have a lot of 1st party applications feeding them training data, customer data might help them fill in some gaps.
- They might also be able get some value out of it without transcribing it. Neural networks can sometimes be pre-trained in an unsupervised manner. One example would be pre-training the network as an autoencoder, which just means training it to reproduce its input as its output. This can reduce convergence time.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#105If you're having trouble (like me) to find your "Google Cloud Platform user account ID" to sign up for Limited Preview access, it's just the email address for your Google Cloud account. Took me only 40 minutes to figure that one out.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you just download subtitles for old movies and train using those?
Doesn't even need to be old movies. Certain types of video content in the US is legally required to have subtitles(e.g. a lot of youtube content). You could programmatically download them and use that as your training set. And, since it is a transformative work, you can train your models even on copyrighted works freely.
In the US, if it's ever been played out on broadcast TV then it must have Closed Captions.
This is enforced by the FCC [0], but as more and more "internet" content gets consumed I imagine the same regulations will eventually come, at which point you've got a fantastic training set.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#107Earlier 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…
In my experiences, the issues with building CMU Sphinx are mainly unspecified dependencies, undocumented version requirements, and forgetting to sacrifice the goat when the MSVC redistributable installer pops up.
We've written detailed, up-to-date instructions [1] for installing CMU Sphinx, and now also provide prebuilt binaries [2]!
If you're interested in not sending your audio to Google, CMU Sphinx and other libraries (like Kaldi and Julius), are definitely worth a second look.
[1] https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition/blob/master/refe... [2] https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition/tree/master/thir...
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#108I would say that Google's main goal here is in expanding their training data set, as opposed to creating a new revenue stream. If it hurts competitors (e.g. Nuance) that might only be a side-effect of that main objective, and likely they will not aim to hurt the competition intentionally. As others here have pointed out, the value now for GOOG is in building the best training data-set in the business, as opposed to j…
Google gets plenty of speech training data from Android phones; I doubt they need more from startups.
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#109What is the best speech recognition engine, assuming one has no internet?
Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API
#110I would say that Google's main goal here is in expanding their training data set, as opposed to creating a new revenue stream. If it hurts competitors (e.g. Nuance) that might only be a side-effect of that main objective, and likely they will not aim to hurt the competition intentionally. As others here have pointed out, the value now for GOOG is in building the best training data-set in the business, as opposed to j…
Question from a machine learning noob: how would they use an unlabeled dataset for training? Would Google employees listen to it all (if the ToS would even allow that) and transscribe it, then use the result for training? Or is there another way to make it useful without being labeled?
Couldn't they go the the same route they took with classifying objects in images by using their users to label them? I know recaptcha provides an option to verify yourself by transcribing audio.