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Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

blogs.microsoft.com

41–50 of 164 posts

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Turing test doesn't test for intelligence , simply human-like communication. Things like lying, typing errors, or reaction to insult aren't indicators of an artificial intelligence, but are requirements for passing the Turing test. One of the biggest criticisms of the Turing test is, because it's a behavioral or functional test, there is no way to ensure that the computer is actually thinking intelligently at all…

I can think of no better test of whether some specific being is intelligent than fooling another human into thinking they are. Can you think of a better one? > because it's a behavioral or functional test What else would you test for in an AI other than its output and behavior? Conversely: how would you test a human for intelligence other than through its output and behavior?

Surely that depends upon the human? An infant would do a terrible job. An institutionalized vegetable would fail to provide meaningful information.

A not-very-bright cousin of mine has been heard responding to robo-calls. Would his opinion do?

I think 'intelligence' is ambiguous, but many parts of it can be measured to some degree. Lets give the AI the SAT test perhaps? Or a test of hypothetical arguments. Or ask it how it would tell if you were an intelligent being yourself. Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'.

We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#43
> [...] a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists.

How low would the error rate be for humans that can fully concentrate on listening instead of writing at the same time? Unfortunately, that cannot be tested.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ELIZA could be made to believe in God.

Being made to believe in a god isn't the same as believing in one. Silicon Valley thinks AI is not an epistemological problem, as if neurons can be perfectly simulated atomically and that all intelligence processes can be categorized as structured vs. unstructured. Very naive conclusions. Ironically, they BELIEVE if you simulate the axiomatic neuron perfectly, emergent properties of intelligence will mystically emerg…

For Artificial Intelligence to believe in God would be for it to believe in its makers, which are human. A machine would be intelligent to be aware that it was made by man.

A man doesn't need to believe in God to be intelligent. In fact, the two are pretty much inversely related.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#45
post #39

Knowing Microsoft this will be part of Cortana in a few weeks. I hope it will be integrated soon with the Speech API as well ( https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh361633(v=office.1... ).

It's not necessarily the case that they can do it in near-real-time (or near real time at reasonable scale). I would expect the true state of the art to take a while? Maybe part of the definition is real-time, but the article doesn't specify that.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#46

The term "human parity" refers to a comparison of the error rate, which is a single scalar summarizing performance in terms of mistakes made. It says nothing about the kind of mistakes, and I can easily imagine that machines qualitatively do not make at all the same kind of mistakes as humans. I'd be curious to know if the kind of mistakes machines make might strike human listeners as quite stupid, but maybe not.. ma…

That reminds me of the photocopier that used a very poorly chosen image compression algorithm. It would sometimes substitute similar looking characters to save space. A $7000 figure in a budget might become $9000 and a person looking over the document would have no indication that the '9' had been cut and pasted from somewhere else on the page.

Google Voice transcription often makes easily detectable mistakes that I can mentally correct using context. Smarter, context-aware mistakes might be worse, if they are also more difficult to detect.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#48
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being made to believe in a god isn't the same as believing in one. Silicon Valley thinks AI is not an epistemological problem, as if neurons can be perfectly simulated atomically and that all intelligence processes can be categorized as structured vs. unstructured. Very naive conclusions. Ironically, they BELIEVE if you simulate the axiomatic neuron perfectly, emergent properties of intelligence will mystically emerg…

For Artificial Intelligence to believe in God would be for it to believe in its makers, which are human. A machine would be intelligent to be aware that it was made by man. A man doesn't need to believe in God to be intelligent. In fact, the two are pretty much inversely related.

Believing in a god is unique to the human species. No other animal does this. Thus, if you want full and complete simulation of human intelligence, this is the ultimate benchmark to test against.

Furthermore, the purpose of this thought experiment is that you CANNOT know what god an AI would end up believing in. That should make you rethink everything you think you know about theology and reexamine it under epistemological terms

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#49

The term "human parity" refers to a comparison of the error rate, which is a single scalar summarizing performance in terms of mistakes made. It says nothing about the kind of mistakes, and I can easily imagine that machines qualitatively do not make at all the same kind of mistakes as humans. I'd be curious to know if the kind of mistakes machines make might strike human listeners as quite stupid, but maybe not.. ma…

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Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#50
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Turing test doesn't test for intelligence , simply human-like communication. Things like lying, typing errors, or reaction to insult aren't indicators of an artificial intelligence, but are requirements for passing the Turing test. One of the biggest criticisms of the Turing test is, because it's a behavioral or functional test, there is no way to ensure that the computer is actually thinking intelligently at all…

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