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Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

awni.github.io

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Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#51

Post by ryanbrunner »

joemag wrote: post #28
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.

The thing is, even if you can't do much better than a computer on pure recognition of words, you have far superior error detection and correction abilities. If a computer mishears a word, it likely just assumes it was whatever was closest, resulting in nonsense sentences. A human will be usually able to "fill in the blanks" on something they didn't hear, or failing that, be able to ask for someone to repeat it.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#53

Post by ChuckMcM »

Too many people equate speech to text as 'speech recognition' and it clearly isn't. What is not a solved problem is Natural Language Processing. That NLP isn't solved, is a fertile source of papers. What is 'kinda' solved is the voice CLI, that is where speech is converted to text, that text is inserted in a class command interpreter, and if recognized the command is executed, otherwise it isn't.

Nobody expects to be able to type 'find me the files that changed yesterday' into a computer shell and have it do something sensible. But 'find ./ -type -f -mtime yesterday' sure we can expect that to work. Getting from the first one to the second one requires something called an ontology.

I worked on a team at IBM that was building this sort of capability. The plan was that in conjunction with an excellent tool kit for disassembling a sentence into its component parts (verbs, nouns, adjectives etc) and then matching the elements recognized with an onotology associated with that action. 'find' being the verb would select the search action ontology, 'files' as an object of the verb would select the computer files object ontology, and then 'changed' and 'yesterday' would match 'modification' in that ontology and 'yesterday' would match one of the two sub children of 'modification' (time and change-actor). Then you would go back with what was the compiler equivalent of an abstract syntax tree which the 'command generator' would use to emit the necessary command actions and flags.

I have no idea why they cancelled it. It was an inscrutable place to work at in many ways :-).

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#54

Post by drzaiusapelord »

johnramsden wrote: post #6

What I would like to see you would be an open source speech recognition system that is easy to use, and works. There is really no match for the proprietary solutions in the open source world right now, and that is disappointing. Not to say that there aren't open source speech recognition systems, they just aren't completely usable in the way proprietary solutions are. A lot of research goes into open source speech re…

Mozilla may not be able to make much headway until these patents expire:

https://www.quora.com/Is-anyone-working-on-an-open-source-ve...

Apparently, the business model for voice services in the past has been to snap up as many broad patents as possible to keep competitors at bay. I read an interview with a google engineer a couple years back claiming the same thing. They have to carefully work around a patent minefield with their own services and how these patents are holding back better voice search on mobile technology.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#55

Post by soperj »

fillskills wrote: post #43
noir_lord wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Wow, I wish there was an easy way to pay back star teachers or mentors.

Is it really that they were a star? Or just that they cared.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#56

Post by mintplant »

johnramsden wrote: post #6

What I would like to see you would be an open source speech recognition system that is easy to use, and works. There is really no match for the proprietary solutions in the open source world right now, and that is disappointing. Not to say that there aren't open source speech recognition systems, they just aren't completely usable in the way proprietary solutions are. A lot of research goes into open source speech re…

Speech synthesis is in a similar situation. The FOSS options that I know of are completely primitive compared to their proprietary counterparts, particularly those locked away behind the cloud. Unfortunately this area seems to receive much less attention than speech recognition (AFAIK it's a non-goal of the Mozilla project, for example).

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#57

Post by gok »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #53

Too many people equate speech to text as 'speech recognition' and it clearly isn't. What is not a solved problem is Natural Language Processing. That NLP isn't solved, is a fertile source of papers. What is 'kinda' solved is the voice CLI, that is where speech is converted to text, that text is inserted in a class command interpreter, and if recognized the command is executed, otherwise it isn't. Nobody expects to be…

"Speech Recognition" is an accepted term of art for "speech to text" or "transcription." "Speech Understanding" is a related but different problem.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#58

Post by com2kid »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #53

Too many people equate speech to text as 'speech recognition' and it clearly isn't. What is not a solved problem is Natural Language Processing. That NLP isn't solved, is a fertile source of papers. What is 'kinda' solved is the voice CLI, that is where speech is converted to text, that text is inserted in a class command interpreter, and if recognized the command is executed, otherwise it isn't. Nobody expects to be…

> Nobody expects to be able to type 'find me the files that changed yesterday'

Google Photos is pretty close.

"photos from december" works fine. "Find photos from decemeber" doesn't.

I can type in "effects photos" and find photos Google applied effects to, which is pretty nifty.

It is probably equivalent to the old game parsers in intelligence, but for a given domain it works pretty well.

They could stand to filter out a lot more words, but it works OK in general. If I type in "photos with a blue sky" it knows to drop "photos with a", photos presumably being redundant on photos.google.com!

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#59

Post by cscurmudgeon »

throwmenow_0140 wrote: post #44
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #3

Just the other day I was arguing (pleasantly) with someone here on HN saying that AI has solved speech rec (among other tasks). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15429287 Wish this article was written a few days earlier. An analogue of this article exists for most other domains claimed to have been solved.

Sorry to bother you, but the translation of your comment is pretty good (English -> Spanish -> French -> English): No, it's not learning new classes of objects from a single image or a few images is very difficult. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1332.short The machine translation is a joke. Put comments on this page by translating Google into another language and go back to English and see what you ge…

I am not sure that is a good translation because it completely misses a common idiom: "within spitting distance"

"spitting the distance from the performance of the human level"

If this were spoken out loud, it might get mistaken for "splitting the distance" which seems to have a different meaning (half as good as humans).

But the point is subtle differences matter a lot in human communication.

But, I do agree with your point that in a lot of cases even without human-level performance one can get things done.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#60

Post by Digit-Al »

soperj wrote: post #55
fillskills wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I wish there was an easy way to pay back star teachers or mentors.

Is it really that they were a star? Or just that they cared.

The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes just caring when no one else does can make someone a star... at least to the person they help.
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