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Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

awni.github.io

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Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#141

Post by dragontamer »

Cacti wrote: post #131
dragontamer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The TPU architecture isn't that weird Its "weird" in the ways that matter: there's no commodity hardware in existence that replicates what a TPU does. The only place to get TPUs is through Google's cloud services. CPUs are basically Von Neumann Architecture. GPUs (NVidia and AMD) are basically SIMD / SIMT systems. Google's TPU is just something dramatically different, optimized yes for Matrix Multiplication, but it…

> but its not something you can buy and use offline. But you will. The entire point is to put this in a phone, so you can distribute a trained neural net in a way that people can actually use without a desktop and $500-$4,000 GPU.

> But you will. The entire point is to put this in a phone, so you can distribute a trained neural net in a way that people can actually use without a desktop and $500-$4,000 GPU.

As far as I can tell, they put a microphone on your phone and then relay your voice to Google's servers for analysis.

Or Amazon's servers, in the case of the Echo.

I don't see any near-term future where Google's TPUs become widely available for consumers: be it on a phone or desktop. And I'm not aware of any product from the major hardware manufacturers that even attempt to replicate Google's TPU architecture.

NVidia and AMD are sorta going the opposite direction: they're making their GPUs more and more flexible (which will be useful in a wider variety of problems), while Google's TPUs specialize further and further into low-precision matrix multiplications.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#142

Post by rjsw »

spuz wrote: post #101
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…

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.

Only one data point, but I find it much harder to filter out speech from background noise in my second language than I do when people are speaking my first language in a noisy environment. My guess would be that we have multiple ways of processing language that use different bits of our brains.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#143

Post by gok »

dragontamer wrote: post #125
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.

> The TPU architecture isn't that weird Its "weird" in the ways that matter: there's no commodity hardware in existence that replicates what a TPU does. The only place to get TPUs is through Google's cloud services. CPUs are basically Von Neumann Architecture. GPUs (NVidia and AMD) are basically SIMD / SIMT systems. Google's TPU is just something dramatically different, optimized yes for Matrix Multiplication, but it…

It's not that dissimilar in architecture or performance to the Tensor Cores in Volta, which you can buy soon.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#144

Post by jdmichal »

baddox wrote: post #134
jdmichal wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that being too good can also cause you to fail the Turing test. I would not expect a human to be able to answer some questions that may be trivial to a computer. Things like, "What's the square-root of 137?" Or, "Identify this obscure song within 5 seconds of listening from a random starting point."

I suppose that depends on the precise setup of the test. Is the subject (if they're a human) allowed access to a calculator or a computer with an internet connection? Even if they were, timing would be an obvious tell, but an AI could easily be programmed (or could learn) to introduce an appropriate delay.

The idea behind the Turing test isn't whether they can arrive at the same answer given the tools. The idea is whether a human can tell the difference. I would expect any human to answer with something like, "I don't know." Or, "Let me find my calculator..." Either answer would be a lie for a computational AI -- it would know the answer and not require a calculator.

This is, I think, one of the failings of the Turing test. It's easy enough for us to make new humans; making a machine that acts exactly like a human seems like a silly endeavor. I want a machine that can assist us and reinforce our failings. Which means that we can necessarily differentiate it from another human. I vastly prefer that over a machine that has learned to lie to us.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#145

Post by adrianbg »

trengrj wrote: post #139

We recently did a comparative analysis of cloud speech-to-text providers for a project. We looked at: 1. Google Cloud Speech API 2. Microsoft Bing Speech API 3. IBM Watson Speech to Text The ranking was as listed above but we had real challenges working with call-center audio recordings. The quality was less than idea but still very clear. We saw a huge reduction in accuracy compared to in-browser testing. Additional…

Here are some benchmarks on telephone speech, including both APIs and human transcription services:

https://remeeting.com/app/benchmarks

Google actually did pretty badly for us on extended telephone speech. Not sure why.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#146

Post by dragontamer »

gok wrote: post #143
dragontamer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The TPU architecture isn't that weird Its "weird" in the ways that matter: there's no commodity hardware in existence that replicates what a TPU does. The only place to get TPUs is through Google's cloud services. CPUs are basically Von Neumann Architecture. GPUs (NVidia and AMD) are basically SIMD / SIMT systems. Google's TPU is just something dramatically different, optimized yes for Matrix Multiplication, but it…

It's not that dissimilar in architecture or performance to the Tensor Cores in Volta, which you can buy soon.

I wasn't aware of Tensor Cores in Volta.

I'll look into them, thanks!

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#147

Post by noir_lord »

spuz wrote: post #101
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…

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.

I took one of those online tests a while back that said if you get over 25 you need to see a specialist, I got 43.

Not sure I have Asperger's though, I'm just a programmer who likes his own company.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#148

Post by hzhou321 »

I suspect we (human) are very bad at hearing, computers already are doing are much better jobs than us. However, I suspect for most our communication, we do not actually hear the conversation -- we guess the conversation. Only when evidence such as facial response or out-of-context words is caught then we actually try to hear. Even then, we are still trying to second guess.

Computers cannot compete with our guessing ability, not until they are trained with our life experiences.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#149

Post by woodson »

adrianbg wrote: post #110
IshKebab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Separating acoustic model and decoding graph search makes sense since you would need a huge amount of (correctly!) transcribed speech for training. See, for example, this paper by Google [1], where they used 125,000 hours (after filtering out the badly transcribed ones from the original 500,000 hours of transcribed speech) for training an end-to-end acoustic-to-word model. Good "old-school" DNN acoustic models can already be trained with orders of magnitude less training data (hundreds to thousands of hours).

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09975

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#150

Post by d33 »

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…

Sorry to hear that your son has APD! This makes me wonder though - do you know if this condition is language-specific? I assume you taught him English; would he have same problems with a very foreign language - say, Chinese?
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