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Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

awni.github.io

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Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#21

Post by joemag »

Mistakes in understanding speech are common even among humans. My wife and I have to repeat and clarify ourselves fairly frequently in our day to day conversations. She even jokes at times that I must check my hearing, because I often mishear what she said, while she thought she was being perfectly clear.

I think where computers fall short is in two areas:

1) The rate of errors hasn’t hit the inflection point of being comparable to day-to-day intra-human interaction, and

2) There is no good mechanism for detecting and correcting errors. At least, none that I’ve seen.

That second one is important. When I hear my wife ask me “Please, hand me a tractor”, I realize that I must’ve misheard, and ask her to clarify “what?” With speech recognition, I either have to manually re-read and modify recognized text, or cancel and repeat the entire request. Both take time, and negate some of the efficiencies of using speech recognition.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#22

Post by morinted »

I'm part of the stenographer/captioner community as a hobby and you'd be surprised at how many people think that all captions are automatically computer-generated. In reality the practical limitations of autogenerated captions are demonstrated by YouTube's caption system. It's good but even a mistake every other sentence (95%+ accuracy) can completely obfuscate the meaning behind the video.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#23

Post by aidenn0 »

I think some people overestimate how good humans are at speech recognition. Unfamiliar accents and noisy environments cause havoc with many people. I had a friend who learned English in India when I was in High School, so I was used to that accent; many of my classmates in College could not understand anything our Indian T/A said freshmen year.

Similarly I had friends for whom English was a second language who had lived in the US for years and were definitely fluent, but had to enable subtitles for a movie in which the characters had a strong southern accent; in general non-rhotic accents were very troublesome for them having only spoken english with midwesterners.

The article mentions the Scottish accent, and I would call that the hardest accent of native English speakers for those in the US to understand.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#24

Post by PaulHoule »

One thing I see missing is "conversational smarts".

People mishear a certain fraction of what they hear and they'll ask you to clarify what you said.

You could have superhuman performance at tasks like Switchboard and still have something embarrassingly bad in the field because the real task (having a conversation) is not trained for in the competitions with canned training sets.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#25

Post by tyingq »

morinted wrote: post #22

I'm part of the stenographer/captioner community as a hobby and you'd be surprised at how many people think that all captions are automatically computer-generated. In reality the practical limitations of autogenerated captions are demonstrated by YouTube's caption system. It's good but even a mistake every other sentence (95%+ accuracy) can completely obfuscate the meaning behind the video.

I've seen some pretty terrible human produced captions on television shows as well.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#26

Post by [deleted] »

twothamendment wrote: post #12

It is one thing to hear and correctly identify the words. It is another to understand the meaning. I've been thinking about this because my son has Auditory Processing Disorder, APD. He can hear great, even a whisper across the house. The trouble is the words don't always make sense. He can tell me the words he heard and they are correct, but assigning a meaning to them doesn't work like it does for most people. Afte…

[deleted]

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#27

Post by twothamendment »

aidenn0 wrote: post #23

I think some people overestimate how good humans are at speech recognition. Unfamiliar accents and noisy environments cause havoc with many people. I had a friend who learned English in India when I was in High School, so I was used to that accent; many of my classmates in College could not understand anything our Indian T/A said freshmen year. Similarly I had friends for whom English was a second language who had li…

I had a chance to live in the middle of the "hood" in a large American city for about 6 months. I was one of the few white guys around. I spoke English, they spoke English - but it was about a week before I could understand people, especially on a crowded city bus. The first few days felt like a foreign country and it was the same country I grew up in! I wonder how well Siri and friends work with Ebonics?

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#28

Post by joemag »

aidenn0 wrote: post #23

I think some people overestimate how good humans are at speech recognition. Unfamiliar accents and noisy environments cause havoc with many people. I had a friend who learned English in India when I was in High School, so I was used to that accent; many of my classmates in College could not understand anything our Indian T/A said freshmen year. Similarly I had friends for whom English was a second language who had li…

Agree with this. I’m currently traveling to a country where English is not the primary language, but is still spoken universally. I am having a hell of a time understanding people - the unfsmikiar accent is wrecking havoc with my brain’s speech recognition centers.

I’m currently where speech recognition software was in the 90s.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#29

Post by twothamendment »

joemag wrote: post #21

Mistakes in understanding speech are common even among humans. My wife and I have to repeat and clarify ourselves fairly frequently in our day to day conversations. She even jokes at times that I must check my hearing, because I often mishear what she said, while she thought she was being perfectly clear. I think where computers fall short is in two areas: 1) The rate of errors hasn’t hit the inflection point of bein…

"I want some taquitos" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA-LGL9iMh4

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#30

Post by noir_lord »

twothamendment wrote: post #12

It is one thing to hear and correctly identify the words. It is another to understand the meaning. I've been thinking about this because my son has Auditory Processing Disorder, APD. He can hear great, even a whisper across the house. The trouble is the words don't always make sense. He can tell me the words he heard and they are correct, but assigning a meaning to them doesn't work like it does for most people. Afte…

I'd never heard of APD.

Interesting, all my life I've struggled to follow a conversation in a crowded environment, so much so that I actively avoid background noise with words in, I work with silicon ear plugs in or headphones and music with no lyrics.

Looking at NHS symptoms they describe me as a child, didn't learn to read until I was 8.

I nearly ended up in the remedial track but for a single awesome teacher who spotted that it wasn't that I was incapable but that I was struggling to understand in a noisy classroom, she gave up her lunch time for 6mths and taught me one on one by the end of that year I could read much better.

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