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Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

awni.github.io

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Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#71

Post by jdmichal »

Radim wrote: post #19

Just the other day, I participated in a discussion about how "language identification" is a solved problem -- in fact, hasn't it been solved for a decade? As anyone who's had to use langid in practice will testify, it's solved only as long as: A) you want to identify 1 out of N languages (reality: a text can be in any language, outside your predefined set) B) you assume the text is in exactly one language (reality: c…

In other words, we have some systems that are great at processing spherical cows in a vacuum...

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#73

Post by gok »

dragontamer wrote: post #32
ddevault wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - I don't care how good Google gets it, this is an unsolved problem until I can do it with open source tools operating without an internet connection.

Google has basically invented a special processor with a very, very, VERY weird architecture for these sorts of tasks: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx4hafXDDq2EMzRNcy1vSUxtcEk... I don't think this level of computational power can be achieved on a modern CPU, or even a GPU! But GPUs are probably the closest analog to Google's absurdly parallel architecture. To get a GPU working at maximum performance, you either…

The TPU architecture isn't that weird...it's basically a hardware implementation of matrix multiplication. It also isn't a silver bullet for ASR, where neural networks are usually only used for a part of the recognition process.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#74

Post by gok »

astrodust wrote: post #69
gok wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd challenge you to transcribe a casual conversation without understanding. Too many words sound very similar, if not identical, and the context of the conversation dictates which word is in play. Even something simple like "They're unhappy, Ness" could be interpreted as "Their unhappiness" unless you know Ness is a person in the converation.

That's like saying because "O" and "0" have the same shape that we can't solve OCR without general AI.

A modern statistical speech recognition system has no trouble determining that "they're unhappy, ness" is a dramatically less likely word sequence than "their unhappiness".

edit: I read your example backwards, but still, a statistical system can easily incorporate contextual words without actually understanding what they mean. Names from the speaker's contacts in particular are widely used in ASR systems for this reason.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#75

Post by macintux »

saosebastiao wrote: post #11

I would argue that it can't be solved without severe privacy implications. Apple's talk-to-text, for example, should know my son's name by now, but it doesn't. And while I'm mildly frustrated at the fact that I have to go back and edit text messages on a regular basis, I'm pretty glad that Apple doesn't know my son's name. I'd hate for a company like Facebook to have access to all of the proper nouns in my everyday l…

You can teach your iPhone to know your son's name:

http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/10/19/how-to-teach-siri-...

You'd need to create a contact if he doesn't already have one.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#77

Post by [deleted] »

twothamendment wrote: post #27
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?

[deleted]

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#78

Post by ImSkeptical »

recursive wrote: post #72
soperj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the difference?

I don't mean to denigrate the wonderful contribution that the teacher in question made, as it's truly a selfless commitment with life changing impact. However -

One distinction may be that the star teacher scales better. What if there were two students with this problem? Should the teacher stay late? Should teachers not take lunch? What if someone needs help in math, etc.

A star teacher may be able to reproduce this effect for a large number of students. Perhaps using technology, recorded lectures, practice apps, etc. Perhaps organizing study groups for kids to teach and learn from each other.

A caring teacher may sacrifice her lunch. A star teacher may not need to.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#79

Post by LandoCalrissian »

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…

I recently have been trying out open source solutions for voice recognition for a personal project and you are very correct that it lags very far behind proprietary solutions. Pocketsphinx is still very limited and Kaldi takes quite a bit to setup in a usable fashion. There were a few other options I looked at that I can't think of from the top of my head but were all in similar condition.

As the article says latency is still a problem and it's a huge problem in current open source solutions, some stuff I was testing was easily 5 seconds. I know that can be improved with configuration, but when dealing with libraries of 10 words or so, that's pretty bad.

I feel like anyone who is seriously interested in this space has been scooped up by all the big companies and the open source solutions have really seemed to linger because of it. It's one of the first areas I've seen where open source alternatives are really behind the proprietary solutions. Kind of bummed me out.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#80

Post by ghaff »

mintplant wrote: post #56
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).

I suspect that it’s widely recognized that getting incremental advances in speech synthesis is really hard and, unlike potentially speech recognition, it doesn’t really solve a problem that people have. For business services and consumer devices slightly better voices are valuable but, for example, the improvements in the latest Siri voice don’t make any new things possible. But it’s part of the fit and finish of an expensive phone.
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