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Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

machinelearning.apple.com

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Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#71

Post by justinjlynn »

MBCook wrote: post #70
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with this example. Could you elaborate on the Atari thing, please?

Atari wanted people to want Atari games, not Frank Jones games. They considered their programmers replaceable cogs and refused to give them credit. That's why the Easter egg in Adventure with the programmer's name exists. It was the only way to get his name out there. What happened was the developers didn't like this and left to start their own company, Activision, which made some of the best remembered games on the…

Thanks for posting the explanation -- I thought that Atari's early policies were pretty widely known. Anyhow, here's some further references for the interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(Atari_2600)#Easter_... .

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#72

Post by amelius »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #62
amelius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a quite unattractive proposition for ML researchers to work for a company without being able to publish. I'm guessing Apple simply had to make this change in order to stay in the game.

There was a lot of internal pushing for publication, apparently. But Apple decided they don't want individual engineers to get credits for ML work that whole teams are working on, so they came up with their ML blog to post papers without individual credit. At least, that's how it was explained by some of the ML researchers to this year's summer intern class.

Why not credit the whole team then, by making them all authors?

Did you ever see the list of authors on publications of CERN? Or take this example: [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-m...

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#73

Post by tinus_hn »

edwhitesell wrote: post #26
beisner wrote: post #3

A research paper published by Apple? About Siri?! Unheard of! Last time I was at an NLP conference wth Apple employees they wouldn't say anything about how Siri speech worked, despite being very inquisitive about everyone else's publications. Good to see some change.

It's probably safe to assume a lot of that was due to some/most of Siri being licensed from Nuance initially. I mean, who wants to talk about a new product, which most people think is brand new and entirely innovative, just to say "Oh yeah, we paid someone else to work with us to create it." Not that there's anything wrong with that and it certainly seems like Apple has been investing in-house pretty heavily in recen…

The part licensed from Nuance is the speech recognition, not the voice.

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#74

Post by saagarjha »

MBCook wrote: post #68
dmix wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to have my Instapaper articles read to me in that TTS voice. Hopefully it gets ported to MacOS's say CLI utility. I typically use that with `pbpaste | say` to read my articles.

I would assume that the OS X TTS engine is the same as Siri's as it would be available in High Sierra. Is the one in Sierra different from Siri in iOS 10?

> I would assume that the OS X TTS engine is the same as Siri's as it would be available in High Sierra.

Nope, macOS uses a different set of voices for TTS, which are named differently as well. They work offline and are nowhere as good as Siri.

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#75

Post by edwhitesell »

tinus_hn wrote: post #73
edwhitesell wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably safe to assume a lot of that was due to some/most of Siri being licensed from Nuance initially. I mean, who wants to talk about a new product, which most people think is brand new and entirely innovative, just to say "Oh yeah, we paid someone else to work with us to create it." Not that there's anything wrong with that and it certainly seems like Apple has been investing in-house pretty heavily in recen…

The part licensed from Nuance is the speech recognition, not the voice.

Yes, the post I replied to was talking about NLP.

That said, in my limited experience, organizations doing NLP also have something to offer by way of TTS too.

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#76

Post by flowardnut »

eridius wrote: post #47
zionic wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's two different philosophies. With Apple it's about providing sufficient value such that the consumer will pay a premium for the product. With Google it's about providing the minimum viable value such that the user will provide as much of their data as possible.

Apple also cares strongly about privacy, so there's a lot of stuff they refuse to do in the cloud. Google also cares about privacy, but only in reverse. They don't want you to have any ;)

> Apple also cares strongly about privacy, so there's a lot of stuff they refuse to do in my butt.

The cloud to butt plugin for chrome never fails to crack me up.

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#77

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

amelius wrote: post #72
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of internal pushing for publication, apparently. But Apple decided they don't want individual engineers to get credits for ML work that whole teams are working on, so they came up with their ML blog to post papers without individual credit. At least, that's how it was explained by some of the ML researchers to this year's summer intern class.

Why not credit the whole team then, by making them all authors? Did you ever see the list of authors on publications of CERN? Or take this example: [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-m...

Right, I totally agree with you! That's just how it was explained a couple months ago. shrug

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#78

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

MBCook wrote: post #70
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with this example. Could you elaborate on the Atari thing, please?

Atari wanted people to want Atari games, not Frank Jones games. They considered their programmers replaceable cogs and refused to give them credit. That's why the Easter egg in Adventure with the programmer's name exists. It was the only way to get his name out there. What happened was the developers didn't like this and left to start their own company, Activision, which made some of the best remembered games on the…

Oh I see! I didn't know about that. Thanks for the explanation!

I totally agree that this was an unprecedented move by Apple, considering their past stance on such things. I'm hopeful for the future, though! They seem to have realized (at least a little bit) that community cooperation is valuable.

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#80

Post by MBCook »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #78
MBCook wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atari wanted people to want Atari games, not Frank Jones games. They considered their programmers replaceable cogs and refused to give them credit. That's why the Easter egg in Adventure with the programmer's name exists. It was the only way to get his name out there. What happened was the developers didn't like this and left to start their own company, Activision, which made some of the best remembered games on the…

Oh I see! I didn't know about that. Thanks for the explanation! I totally agree that this was an unprecedented move by Apple, considering their past stance on such things. I'm hopeful for the future, though! They seem to have realized (at least a little bit) that community cooperation is valuable.

The reports from a few months ago word that they basically had to do this because no one was willing to work for them if they weren't able to publish because their career basically stalled.
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