Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
blogs.microsoft.com
Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
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Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
#2I don't have a background in this area, so I'm likely easily impressed, but this seems really impressive. And the acknowledgement that there's a lot of work to be done, such as discriminating between speakers and recognition in adverse environments. Yeah, it's Microsoft writing on their own technology, but they addressed in the text the questions I had already in mind from just reading the title. It didn't leave me with feeling that it's just a marketing piece.
> Still, he cautioned, true artificial intelligence is still on the distant horizon
It's frustrating when technologies like image and speech recognition and robotics are conflated with AI.
Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
#3The actual paper has a section on error analysis that is particularly enlightening: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05256
On the CallHome dataset humans confuse words 4.1% of the time, but delete 6.5% of words, most commonly deleting the word "I".
Their ASR system confuses 6.5% of words on this dataset, but only deletes 3.3% of words, so depending on how you view this their claim about being better than humans isn't definitely true, if you consider the task to be speech recognition, rather than transcription.
Also, while the overall "word error rate" is lower than humans it's not clear if this is because the transcription service they used is not seeking perfect output, but rather good enough output and the errors the transcription service makes may not be as bad as the errors the ASR system makes in terms of how well you can recover the original meaning from the transcription.
It's clearly great work, but reaching human parity is marketing fluff.
Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
#4Good for them!
I'm a bit surprised that the researchers didn't already possess human-level speech recognition, though.
Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
#5I don't have a background in this area, so I'm likely easily impressed, but this seems really impressive. And the acknowledgement that there's a lot of work to be done, such as discriminating between speakers and recognition in adverse environments. Yeah, it's Microsoft writing on their own technology, but they addressed in the text the questions I had already in mind from just reading the title. It didn't leave me w…
I don't get why that's frustrating, without image and speech recognition AI isn't possible. -- How intelligent could people be without sensory perception? Hellen Keller is the exception, take away the ability for humans to process sound, and images as a species and we wouldn't be nearly as advanced as we are today even if we still had the same brain structure and mental capacity.
Ray Kurzweil understood this and is why he paved the way for some of the first speech / image recognition platforms like ocr/fax/etc...
To me speech/image recognition is a precursor/adjunct of AI. You can have the former without the latter, but the latter will never be realized without those.
Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
#6I don't have a background in this area, so I'm likely easily impressed, but this seems really impressive. And the acknowledgement that there's a lot of work to be done, such as discriminating between speakers and recognition in adverse environments. Yeah, it's Microsoft writing on their own technology, but they addressed in the text the questions I had already in mind from just reading the title. It didn't leave me w…
I'm curious, what is your definition of AI?
Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
#7[deleted]
Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
#8I don't have a background in this area, so I'm likely easily impressed, but this seems really impressive. And the acknowledgement that there's a lot of work to be done, such as discriminating between speakers and recognition in adverse environments. Yeah, it's Microsoft writing on their own technology, but they addressed in the text the questions I had already in mind from just reading the title. It didn't leave me w…
I don't get why that's frustrating, without image and speech recognition AI isn't possible. -- How intelligent could people be without sensory perception? Hellen Keller is the exception, take away the ability for humans to process sound, and images as a species and we wouldn't be nearly as advanced as we are today even if we still had the same brain structure and mental capacity. Ray Kurzweil understood this and is w…
The touring test shows AI has little to do with image or speech recognition. An AI that operates in a purely virtual environment would still be revolutionary.
Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
#9I don't have a background in this area, so I'm likely easily impressed, but this seems really impressive. And the acknowledgement that there's a lot of work to be done, such as discriminating between speakers and recognition in adverse environments. Yeah, it's Microsoft writing on their own technology, but they addressed in the text the questions I had already in mind from just reading the title. It didn't leave me w…
I prefer a conceptualization where they are AI, AI is a gradient, and our current tech level is somewhere on the gradient.
Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition
#10I don't have a background in this area, so I'm likely easily impressed, but this seems really impressive. And the acknowledgement that there's a lot of work to be done, such as discriminating between speakers and recognition in adverse environments. Yeah, it's Microsoft writing on their own technology, but they addressed in the text the questions I had already in mind from just reading the title. It didn't leave me w…
Its frustrating when people assume any reference to AI means AGI or strong AI.