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Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

awni.github.io

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Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#101

Post by spuz »

noir_lord wrote: post #30
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 s…

I am sure you have thought about it but since you didn't mention it, are your symptoms those of Asperger's syndrome? Asperger's is often thought of as a sensory perception problem and Aspies tend not to be able to filter out sounds from background noise.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#102

Post by adrianbg »

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…

If you think that's bad, check out the Geordie accent from Newcastle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o

According to Wikipedia it's "a direct continuation and development of the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon settlers" of the region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geordie

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#103

Post by adrianbg »

canjobear wrote: post #10

It's always been a puzzle to me that published WER is so low, and yet when I use dictation (which is a lot--I use it for almost all text messages) I always have to make numerous corrections. This sentence is crucial and suggests a way to understand how WER can be apparently lower than human levels, yet ASR is still obviously imperfect: > When comparing models to humans, it’s important to check the nature of the mista…

The low WER numbers you've probably seen are for conversational telephone speech with constrained subjects. ASR is much harder when the audio source is farther away from the microphone and when the topic isn't constrained.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#104

Post by autokad »

noir_lord wrote: post #30
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 s…

wonder if i have that. i always try to fill in words with context or words that rhyme with the sound. - when people talk on tv, i need the volume at 95%, everything else like 4 bars. - i hate phones because only one ear gets the information, headphones makes talking on the phone so much more relaxing. - i dont understand how anyone understands anything at clubs, how is that even possible?

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#105

Post by adrianbg »

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 to text is exactly speech recognition. Speech to text isn't solved.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#107

Post by dharma1 »

LandoCalrissian wrote: post #79
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…

Kaldi is the best, there was just Tensorflow integration added which will hopefully speed up development (though I haven't seen any pretrained models for that yet).

Here's a blog post - http://www.googblogs.com/kaldi-now-offers-tensorflow-integra...

The easiest way to deploy Kaldi is this - https://github.com/alumae/kaldi-gstreamer-server (or a docker image of the that)

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#108

Post by adrianbg »

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…

You are correct that the problem is data. Kaldi is hard to use, but making it easier to use isn't as hard as getting good training data. Mozilla's project is a good start for some purposes. One flaw with it is that they're having people read sentences. When people read, they tend to speak more clearly than when they're figuring out what to say on the fly. This means models trained with Mozilla's data will tend to need people to speak extra clearly than eg. a model trained on conversational data.

(edits: spelling/grammar)

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#109

Post by pishpash »

adrianbg wrote: post #108
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…

You are correct that the problem is data. Kaldi is hard to use, but making it easier to use isn't as hard as getting good training data. Mozilla's project is a good start for some purposes. One flaw with it is that they're having people read sentences. When people read, they tend to speak more clearly than when they're figuring out what to say on the fly. This means models trained with Mozilla's data will tend to nee…

Oh it's not "hard" to get training data, you just need loads of money to buy the existing datasets.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#110

Post by adrianbg »

IshKebab wrote: post #98
gok wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Although some models are end-to-end neural nets, most of the ones in production (and all of the ones that get state of the art results) only use a neural net for one part of the process. Lots of people are as surprised as you, but that's the way it is.

Edit: I should say that in state of the art results there tend to be multiple components, including multiple neural nets and the tricky "decode graph" that gok and I are talking about. These are trained separately then get stuck together, as opposed to being trained in an end-to-end fashion.

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