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Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

awni.github.io

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Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#91

Post by gok »

astrodust wrote: post #90
gok wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's because it doesn't care, it just goes for the most statistically probable phrasing in a general conversation, not the one you're actually having. As for the OCR problem, try writing one for Chinese calligraphy and get back to me on if context is important or not.

Context is certainly extremely important, but a model can incorporates context without general understanding.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#92

Post by dboreham »

gsnedders wrote: post #87
awnihannun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point. It can be hard for a US native English speaker to recognize a Scottish accent. But, other Scottish people certainly don't have trouble with understanding a Scottish accent. So I view that as a certificate that we should be able to build a speech recognizer which can recognize Scottish accents.

> But, other Scottish people certainly don't have trouble with understanding a Scottish accent. So I view that as a certificate that we should be able to build a speech recognizer which can recognize Scottish accents. As a Scottish person, I'll say there's a huge amount of variation between Scots dialects. As someone who grew up in Fife, it took me well over a year of living in Glasgow to be able to reliably understa…

Parliamo Glasgow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfCk_yNuTGk

I also grew up in Fife, although my parents paid good money so I would have an Edinburgh accent. Glasgow was like a foreign country to us...

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#93

Post by ghaff »

theresistor wrote: post #46
theresistor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just in France last week suffering through the same problem. I’m American, so I want to keep my system set to English both due to familiarity of the interface and because I want data in familiar units (miles, degrees Fahrenheit), but it kills me when every street and place name is absolutely butchered.

An interesting observation I made last week was that the poor synthesis of French street names in English mode was worse than American-mispronouncing-French level. I wonder if that exposes some level of mismatch between how the synthesis engine models language and how humans do.

In the case of French names it probably depends on if you have any exposure to French pronunciation rules at all. I have a pretty crappy level of high school French but I can usually manage not to butcher pronunciation. I was with a friend in Montreal though and she had absolutely no idea how to pronounce many things.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#94

Post by akvadrako »

ImSkeptical wrote: post #78
recursive wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing about teaching is that you can be star just by having one success story. If you are a vital part of the success of 2 people you've already clearly contributed more than your share.

But one is enough; some of the most famous scientists only got where they were because they had a specific advisor. Neither the teacher nor student would ever have accomplished half as much working alone.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#95

Post by MereInterest »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #68
bagacrap wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since then I've thought about voice recognition differently. The AI to understand the context or fill in the blanks is what will make or break it. Of course, and all humans rely on this as well. No one hears every word perfectly all the time --- it's impossible, because the source person doesn't pronounce every word perfectly all the time. Context clues are a huge part of speech recognition, as well as gestural typ…

This is why I think Google recently saying 95% word accuracy is just as good as a human is wrong. If I ask if you after dinner if you "Want to get a pizza cake", you'll probably quickly realize I mean "piece of cake". Mistakes like that in 1/20 words is a lot. Google is the best of all the big players at figuring out this context (I once asked it what a Dead Left Shrimp was, apparently I was mishearing the name of ba…

Not only that, but even if you were to get 100% word accuracy, context is still important for choosing between multiple possible meanings.

As an example, I was being directed by Google Maps to a new place, and I asked it "What is the ETA?" It responded, "From Wikipedia, the estimated time of arrival or ETA is the time when a ship, vehicle, aircraft, cargo or emergency service is expected to arrive at a certain place." It was a completely valid answer to the question, but not one that any human would give.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#97

Post by beamatronic »

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…

TIL I have APD

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#98

Post by IshKebab »

gok wrote: post #73
dragontamer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neural networks are used for nearly all of ASR now. Last I heard only the spectral components were still calculated not using a neural net and the text-to-speech is now entirely neural network (i.e. you feed text in and get audio samples out). I'd be surprised if they don't do that for ASR too soon if they haven't already.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#99

Post by gsnedders »

dboreham wrote: post #92
gsnedders wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, other Scottish people certainly don't have trouble with understanding a Scottish accent. So I view that as a certificate that we should be able to build a speech recognizer which can recognize Scottish accents. As a Scottish person, I'll say there's a huge amount of variation between Scots dialects. As someone who grew up in Fife, it took me well over a year of living in Glasgow to be able to reliably understa…

Parliamo Glasgow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfCk_yNuTGk I also grew up in Fife, although my parents paid good money so I would have an Edinburgh accent. Glasgow was like a foreign country to us...

> I also grew up in Fife, although my parents paid good money so I would have an Edinburgh accent.

I grew up in St Andrews, both of my parents having grown up in England, and went through speech therapy as a young child (due to dyspraxia); unsurprisingly, with that, you can imagine my accent is much closer to RP than any broad Fife accent, though most of my speech is definitely Standard Scottish English.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#100

Post by adrianbg »

ghaff wrote: post #36
j_s wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too would be interested in pointers to the leading open source options. Just yesterday there was a Show HN built with the https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi project, emscripten-ized: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534531

When I looked a while back, CMUSphinx seemed to be the most promising option but I struggled to get it installed and got distracted with real work. Some discussions online suggest it’s still fairly poor compared to the online engines. Snips was mentioned here recently but I haven’t taken a look at it.

CMUSphinx is really old. Kaldi is hard to use, but it's much better.
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