Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

awni.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 208 posts

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#151

Post by aidenn0 »

awnihannun wrote: post #49
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 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.

A speech recognizer that has been trained with General American (which is likely the largest corpus we have), is analagous for a US native English speaker, so I wouldn't expect it to work on Scottish accents.

Whether or not gathering a sufficiently large corpus of other dialects will solve the problem would be interesting; also it might be uneconomical to gather a large enough corpus of some dialects, leaving minorities out.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#152

Post by splatcollision »

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…

For Watson Speech to Text - Did you choose the correct model to match your source audio quality? They default to a "Broadband" model intended for high quality audio sources, but you can also select "Narrowband" for things like phone quality. Not guaranteeing a difference, but in my experience, matching the source quality to the correct model makes some difference.

I've not compared them extensively but for streaming realtime, I found that Watson beat the Google api for a specific use-case. Your mileage may vary!

They also provide a handy Mic / File reader interface for browsers: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/speech-javascript-...

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#153

Post by shpx »

dragontamer wrote: post #141
Cacti wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Neural nets take large GPUs (or TPUs) to train. Realtime inference on CPUs has been possible since forever.

Also, I just turned on airplane mode and google assistant recognized my voice.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#154

Post by twic »

adrianbg wrote: post #102
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

Jimmy Nail! Nevertheless, Rab C. Nesbitt remains my high water mark for impenetrability in British television:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkC0jCoedHc

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#155

Post by woodson »

adrianbg wrote: post #133
jjwiseman wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize Kaldi could get state of the art results. Do you say that because you know of people doing that, or is your comment based on knowing the architecture of Kaldi?

The 8.5% in this file is what you'd compare to Microsoft and IBM's recent ~5% results. https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi/blob/master/egs/fisher_sw... Kaldi hasn't been in first place on that dataset recently, but it was a few years ago. On other more researchy datasets (eg. for distant speakers or languages other than English), the best system is often based on Kaldi.

One reason for the discrepancy between quoted numbers is that, if you are only after pushing that number down and not particularly interested in getting a scalable system, then you are free to run as many systems as you like in as many configurations as possible and then try to combine their outputs (ROVER etc.).

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#157

Post by yters »

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…

Just because they didn't solve all the problems doesn't mean it's irrelevant they solved one problem.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#158

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

I think you're making a mistake here.

You might be a star programmer, but only if you re-wrote every single program exceptionally, because clearly it's not making a fundamental change to someone's life once that counts, you're not a star until you've done that for everyone ...?

Going above and beyond the expectations of your role in order to make a fundamental change to someone's life is enough to call someone a "star" IMO. It's not like someone asked you to personally pay them a bonus, you can award all exceptional effort s a "star" without problem.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#159

Post by sytelus »

Can this be attributed to lack of good challenging open and large enough dataset that can be used as benchmark?

The switchboard dataset was "challanging" in its time but pointless from current standards. One doesn't have to look beyond trying to do voice dictation in car to see how horrible current speed recognition systems are compared to humans.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#160

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pjc50 wrote: post #33
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…

Obligatory "voice recognition lift in Scotland" comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU Personally I've had to "translate" between a South African and an Ulsterman before, both of whom were speaking English but with extremely different accents.

I find with accents if I try and imitate the sound then it can become clear the closest word form that produces that sound, if that makes sense.

This works well both in speech and sign with our 1 year old too (oh not "poo" but "boots"; {moves open hand forward and backwards away from body at chest height} oh right "lawnmower" ...).

Post reply on HN