Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Project Common Voice

voice.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 61 posts

Re: Project Common Voice

#21

Post by cooper12 »

If they're planning to make a voice recognition system, why are they using example statements that are clearly taken from novels? [0] That's not how real people talk. They use a lot more slang, a lot more stopping and starting, filler words, etc. Instead you have people saying things like "irresolute", "rumbling", and other complex words. It would be useful for training a novel dictation system, but it's not how people would speak to their browser for example.

[0]: An example sentence is "a thin circle of bright metal showed between the top and the bottom of the body of the cylinder", which is from H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

Re: Project Common Voice

#22

Post by tomhoward »

pvinis wrote: post #19
ibotty wrote: post #17

Any idea why the duplicate detection did not work for this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14786881 Anyhow: these should be merged (even though there is no discussion on the other submission)

I think that's why. When the previous thread is not very active, dup's are allowed. Not sure though.

Yes. The system is designed to allow multiple chances for good content to get exposure.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20deliberately%20porous&s...

Re: Project Common Voice

#23

Post by jpalomaki »

cooper12 wrote: post #21

If they're planning to make a voice recognition system, why are they using example statements that are clearly taken from novels? [0] That's not how real people talk. They use a lot more slang, a lot more stopping and starting, filler words, etc. Instead you have people saying things like "irresolute", "rumbling", and other complex words. It would be useful for training a novel dictation system, but it's not how peop…

Maybe there's not yet good open datasets available for this kind of material?

This gives Amazon, Apple and Google a nice advantage since they are able to collect huge sample sets of actual voice commands used by people and to some extent also correlate them with the actual action taken by the person.

How could we collect such dataset? It's a bit chicken-egg problem. I don't want to talk to some open source system unless it has fairly good chance of understanding me. Should we try to half manually (through crowd sourcing) come up with potential requests like "Check news from CNN.com", "Order me quattro stagioni" which could be then fed to platform like Common Voice?

Or should we work on higher level. Come up with task descriptions ("You want to order taxi to get to airport for your morning flight at 7am") and then let people record how they would actually request this from computer with voice. This might more accurately capture the language we actually use when speaking. Through some simple automation you could generate variations of the requests and at least partly the same base material could be used for different languages (task given in English, ask person to make the request in Finnish).

Re: Project Common Voice

#24

Post by albertzeyer »

The terminology is a bit confusing. They are saying that they want to build voice recognition but it seems like they actually might want to build a speech recognition engine. Speech recognition is about recognizing the speech, the spoken words. Voice recognition is about recognizing the speakers voice, i.e. identifying the speaker. Also, maybe they also want to build a text-to-speech (TTS) system but I'm not sure.

No matter what, the collected data might be useful for all of that, maybe except of voice recognition actually, because I guess the data will be collected anonymously?

Note that there are some other existing big open speech corpora such as LibriSpeech (http://www.openslr.org/12/) which could already be used right now to build a quite good speech recognition system.

Re: Project Common Voice

#25

Post by amelius »

albertzeyer wrote: post #24

The terminology is a bit confusing. They are saying that they want to build voice recognition but it seems like they actually might want to build a speech recognition engine. Speech recognition is about recognizing the speech, the spoken words. Voice recognition is about recognizing the speakers voice, i.e. identifying the speaker. Also, maybe they also want to build a text-to-speech (TTS) system but I'm not sure. No…

> Speech recognition is about recognizing the speech, the spoken words. Voice recognition is about recognizing the speakers voice, i.e. identifying the speaker.

Perhaps they want to do both eventually (?) That could explain the name.

Re: Project Common Voice

#26

Post by john2x »

albertzeyer wrote: post #24

The terminology is a bit confusing. They are saying that they want to build voice recognition but it seems like they actually might want to build a speech recognition engine. Speech recognition is about recognizing the speech, the spoken words. Voice recognition is about recognizing the speakers voice, i.e. identifying the speaker. Also, maybe they also want to build a text-to-speech (TTS) system but I'm not sure. No…

Could they use the different voices to generate unique, natural-sounding voices for text-to-speech?

Re: Project Common Voice

#27

Post by oulipo »

apeddle wrote: post #9

This looks great! I use voice control to program on occasion due to an rsi injury. The standard stack for this is a mess due to closed source systems that aren't designed for voice programmers. A good open solution could really save me from a lot of headaches.

You can take a look at what we build at https://snips.ai, we will open-source the platform later this year

Re: Project Common Voice

#28

Post by saurik »

jpalomaki wrote: post #23
cooper12 wrote: post #21

If they're planning to make a voice recognition system, why are they using example statements that are clearly taken from novels? [0] That's not how real people talk. They use a lot more slang, a lot more stopping and starting, filler words, etc. Instead you have people saying things like "irresolute", "rumbling", and other complex words. It would be useful for training a novel dictation system, but it's not how peop…

Maybe there's not yet good open datasets available for this kind of material? This gives Amazon, Apple and Google a nice advantage since they are able to collect huge sample sets of actual voice commands used by people and to some extent also correlate them with the actual action taken by the person. How could we collect such dataset? It's a bit chicken-egg problem. I don't want to talk to some open source system unl…

If you want people carefully reading books, it is pretty easy to get a hold of that kind of data in the form of audio books and the work of Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. Sure, it isn't chunked into sentences, but since you have all of the source text you could do a quite reasonable job automating the slicing, throw out places you aren't sure, and still have a near infinite amount of great data. (Note that it isn't like these sentences are perfect anyway, hence the filtering process with volunteers: while I was judging some audio files one of the issues was "person turned off microphone a little too soon".)
Post reply on HN