I've played with the Echo, it is really nice, but ... much like Siri, Cortana and Google Now, using it fully gives up any shred of remaining privacy you had within your own home. I would gladly pay twice as much for an Echo-device that doesn't route all my instructions through $BEHEMOTH servers.
The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo
111–116 of 116 posts
Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. > She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product…
I don't think it will take billions. LSTM+CTC speech recognition implementations are coming to OSS and I think we have large enough available data sets for training without needing Google size resources. Audio books are a good resource for training and it's not hard to amass hundreds or thousands of hours of training material that way. I think we will have 95%+ accuracy ASR as open source trained networks very soon.…
What's the OSS LSTM+CTC package that's coming along?
Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it will take billions. LSTM+CTC speech recognition implementations are coming to OSS and I think we have large enough available data sets for training without needing Google size resources. Audio books are a good resource for training and it's not hard to amass hundreds or thousands of hours of training material that way. I think we will have 95%+ accuracy ASR as open source trained networks very soon.…
What's the OSS LSTM+CTC package that's coming along?
https://github.com/srvk/eesen
I expect there will be something in Kaldi soon, too
Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo
#114ugh, please no gifs, I'm trying to read here!
Big quotes I already read in the text are similarly annoying...
Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait. So Google recognizes a long time ago that machine learning would be important to their business and so invests in a variety of projects to aid with that; Google 411, Google Books, etc. But because Apple either didn't have the foresight or chose not to invest in these technologies, Google should be forced to donate their data sets? To one of the richest companies in the world no less? throws up hands
> But because Apple either didn't have the foresight or chose not to invest in these technologies, Google should be forced to donate their data sets? To one of the richest companies in the world no less? No, I’m not arguing for Apple. I don’t care – they can afford it. I, as a student, can’t afford it. You, if you wish to start such a startup, can’t afford it. And you know what? Google couldn’t do any of this on its…
how exactly is it "working for google for free" when people got to host their videos for free on google's platform...
there's a reason why you don't directly pay for these services, you know?
> I, as a student, can’t afford it. You, if you wish to start such a startup, can’t afford it.
well, if I wish to start such a startup, I would probably work on an alternative e.g. technology that could overcome the need for all that data..
Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Amazon has lots of tiny shell companies like Rawles LLC, fostering distrust and compartmentalization between product teams. Not a healthy work environment.
They are just extremely (ridiculously) secretive. I remember at one point half of the team (up to director level I mean) knew about a project and the other half didn't. The VP and director had to argue hard to just get everyone in the damn loop. Then they made us sign extra stuff and reminded us that we could be fired or sued if we leaked anything blah blah blah. Dysfunctional.
When I was at AWS they seemed to be much more open internally than Digital, but the trend was definitely toward secret projects, e.g. WorkDocs and Aurora. Not being micromanaged by Bezos probably makes AWS generally less dysfunctional than Digital.