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

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#111

Post by cheapsteak » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:21 AM UTC

zkirill wrote: post #102

cheapsteak wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

9 months ago for Portuguese, the amount of effort required for building a language model is too great.

Voice recognition was supposed to have been a cherry-on-top, but ended up taking out one of our senior developers for the duration of the month-long project, and we were ultimately unable to get it working in the time that we had available

A glimpse of what's involved: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/tutoriallm

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#112

Post by sounds » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:33 AM UTC

infocollector wrote: post #109

What is the best speech recognition engine, assuming one has no internet?

At this time, CMU Sphinx or Julius are good choices, not great but worth a look.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#113

Post by braindead_in » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

How well does this work with conversational speech? Any benchmarks?

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#114

Post by omarforgotpwd » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

Fuck. Yes. IBM has a similar API as well as part of their Watson APIs but I really wanted to use Google's.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#115

Post by jjwiseman » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:42 AM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #74

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

From the Microsoft Project Oxford Speech API link: Speech Intent Recognition ... the server returns structured information about the incoming speech so that apps can easily parse the intent of the speaker, and subsequently drive further action. Models trained by the Project Oxford LUIS service are used to generate the intent. Do others offer something like this?

Microsoft LUIS is almost identical to the intent classification and entity extraction in the Alexa Skills Kit, but it's easier to use because you can pipe in your own text from any source instead of having to use a specific speech recognition engine. LUIS also has a pretty nice web interface that prompts you to label utterances that it's seen that it had trouble with.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#116

Post by lovelearning » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:44 AM UTC

alfonsodev wrote: post #70

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.

Nothing out of the box as far as I know. You'll have to DIY.

Have a look at CMUSphinx/Pocketsphinx [1]. I wrote a comment about training it for command recognition in a previous discussion[2].

It supports BNF grammar based training too [3], so I've a vague idea that it may be possible to use your programmming language's BNF to make it recognize language tokens. I haven't tried this out though.

Either way, be prepared to spend some time on the training. That's the hardest part with sphinx.

Also, have you seen this talk for doing it on Unix/Mac [4]? He does use natlink and dragonfly, but perhaps some concepts can be transferred to sphinx too?

[1]: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174762 [3]: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/doc/sphinx4/edu/cmu/sphinx/... [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#117

Post by Negative1 » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:48 AM UTC

I would be hesitant to build an entire application that relied on this API only to have it removed in a few months or years when Google realizes it sucks up time and resources and makes them no money.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#118

Post by jjwiseman » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:57 AM UTC

jaredhansen wrote: post #8

CaveTech wrote: 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.

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.

It depends. Imagine a hardware device that uses the speech API, and you're looking at the 3 year cost of an average of 5 speech interactions per day (something like the Amazon Echo). Using Nuance pricing of $0.008/request, you're adding 365 * 3 * 5 * $.008 = $43.80 in cost above the BOM cost; It's entirely possible that adding $20 to the BOM is viable, but adding $40 is not.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#119

Post by jupp0r » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 6:05 AM UTC

zmodem wrote: post #28

jupp0r wrote: post #19

Anybody got the api docs yet? I wonder if I can stream from chrome via webrtc.

Can't you just use the Web Speech API for that? https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/speech-api/raw-file/tip/speechapi.htm...

I want to use cloud speech api for various reasons

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#120

Post by jonah » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 6:13 AM UTC

SoundHound released Houndify[1], their voice API last year which goes deeper than just speech recognition to include Speech-to-Meaning, Context and Follow-up, and Complex and Compound Queries. It will be cool to see what people will do with speech interfaces in the near future.

[1] https://www.houndify.com/