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Google opens access to its speech recognition API

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Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#161

Post by dharma1 »

blennon wrote: post #67
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.

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.

check out https://github.com/yajiemiao/eesen for LSTM and CTC based library instead of HMMs

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#162

Post by dharma1 »

ericflo wrote: post #7
blennon wrote: 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…

Interesting - I saw this as a defensive response to the rising number of developers using Amazon's Alexa APIs, rather than anything related to Nuance.

It's probably been on their roadmap for a while, before Alexa came out. Re: Alexa/echo - think there is an opportunity for someone to manufacture cheap USB array mics for far field capture.

Still, having this paid and cloud based puts a limit to types of things where you'd use it. I will use it in my own apps for now but will swap to a OSS speech recognition library running locally as soon as one emerges that is good enough.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#163

Post by dharma1 »

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.

Work in the pricing now (assuming it's the same as competition) and architecture your app so it's easy to replace the provider down the line if you need to, without breaking the clients.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#164

Post by dharma1 »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #138
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…

It's been years since I used CMU Sphinx, but don't you have to bring your own training data? Sure, there are free data sets out there, and pre-trained models, but they are not as good as what Google et al. have.

Yes. And it's not just the data sets, its the fundamental technology. You really need state-of-the-art, ie LSTM/CTC to deal with noisy input data and to get to 99% accuracy (in addition to excellent data sets of course)

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#165

Post by zo1 »

amelius wrote: post #38

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

It used to be. I remember "back in the day", windows 95/98 had it. It wasn't perfect, but it was decent with a bit of training such that you could dictate reasonably well.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#166

Post by hardwaresofton »

uberi wrote: post #107
ytjohn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 libra…

Would you mind submitting this documentation to CMU? I get the feeling they'd love to at least host a link to them or something to enhance their own documentation?

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#167

Post by sologoub »

dragonwriter wrote: post #124
sologoub wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They probably are using usage data in the free period to drive decisions on pricing.

Sure, would expect nothing less, but I'm also sure they have some sense of the range they are looking for. Such a range could help developers to establish whether their use case is viable or not.

As is, the ambiguity is a deterrent from too much time investment.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#168

Post by murjinsee »

jrv wrote: post #85
j1vms wrote: post #72

I 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?

All of your audio is recorded (google.com/dashboard) then the audio files are thrown into a lottery. Individual people transcribe what they hear for the computer to build associations.

Or, at least, that's my best guess with zero research and little knowledge.

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#169

Post by dr_zoidberg »

uberi wrote: post #107
ytjohn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 libra…

Yeah I'm gonna leave a reply here just in case I need to find this again (already opened tabs, but you never know). This might be big for a stalled project at work. If this can un-stall that, I'll sure owe you a beer ;)

Re: Google opens access to its speech recognition API

#170

Post by dr_zoidberg »

chetatkinsdiet wrote: post #96
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.

As someone who's worked with a lot of these engines, Nuance and IBM are the only really high quality players in the space. CMUSphinx and Julius are fine for low volume operations where you don't need really accurate response rates, but if you want high accuracy neither comes close from my experience.

For the "dialect" of spanish that we speak in Argentina, Watson misses every single word. So, to me, CMUSphinx is valuable in that it allows me to tweak it, while IBM miserably fails at every word. Must've been trained with Spain or Mexican "neutral" spanish.

Googles engine also works fine (have been trying it with the phones), but the pricing may or may not be a deal breaker.

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