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Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

awni.github.io

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Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#161

Post by throwmenow_0140 »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #59
throwmenow_0140 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to bother you, but the translation of your comment is pretty good (English -> Spanish -> French -> English): No, it's not learning new classes of objects from a single image or a few images is very difficult. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1332.short The machine translation is a joke. Put comments on this page by translating Google into another language and go back to English and see what you ge…

I am not sure that is a good translation because it completely misses a common idiom: "within spitting distance" "spitting the distance from the performance of the human level" If this were spoken out loud, it might get mistaken for "splitting the distance" which seems to have a different meaning (half as good as humans). But the point is subtle differences matter a lot in human communication. But, I do agree with yo…

After reading the translated version again, I'm not sure I can support my statement anymore. I think a big part of my impression was based on the fact the I read the original comment and knew what you were talking about.

> I did a little part of you. Just human level for just a simple little prayer.

It's just bad. It sounds like it's based on a n-gram model - about something religious, strangely enough.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#162

Post by pbhjpbhj »

joemag wrote: post #21

Mistakes in understanding speech are common even among humans. My wife and I have to repeat and clarify ourselves fairly frequently in our day to day conversations. She even jokes at times that I must check my hearing, because I often mishear what she said, while she thought she was being perfectly clear. I think where computers fall short is in two areas: 1) The rate of errors hasn’t hit the inflection point of bein…

One needs to know your wife to know that "hand me a tractor" is wrong. Perhaps she makes model farms as a hobby, perhaps you work in plant rental and that means "pass me the keys to one of the tractors", the possibilities are endless. You need vision, memory, profiling, etc., to even begin to properly contextualise day-to-day conversation.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#163

Post by magicalhippo »

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…

My grandfather was on the ferry from Norway to Denmark with my sister. We're all from Norway. He had quite reduced hearing and used a hearing aid.

They were having dinner at the ships restaurant, and the waiter asked my grandfather something. My grandfather just didn't understand the guy and asked the waiter to repeat several times. After the 4th time, my sister told my grandfather: "Grandpa, he's Swedish". My grandpa paused for a second and then immediately recognized what the waiter had said.

Turns out he had assumed the guy was Danish, and thus failed to interpret the limited sounds he could hear, given the hearing loss and background noise.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#164

Post by Swizec »

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…

Have you ever considered that pizza cake is delicious?

I don’t know about you, but I wanna try this: https://g.co/kgs/4D4er9

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#165

Post by woodson »

sytelus wrote: post #159

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.

There are the CHiME challenges (http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/) that have test data with distant microphone speech and noisy speech data, and IARPA ran its Automatic Speech recognition In Reverberant Environments (ASpIRE) Challenge in 2014/15 (https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/working-with-iarpa/prize-cha...).

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#166

Post by opportune »

rjsw wrote: post #142
spuz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also notice that even though I can't read lips, I often find it much easier to understand what people are saying when I can see them. I think part of the reason speech recognition isn't generally at a human-level is that they don't receive the same amount or kind of data that we do.

An interesting experiment might be to include a speaker's native tongue when trying to recognize their speech in a different language. I bet that speech recognition would be a lot easier on e.g. native Spanish speakers speaking English if you know to ignore, for example, the sound "e" when spoken before "st" or "sp"

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#167

Post by smsm42 »

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'm pretty sure I've seen this exact question (do you have trouble understanding speech in noisy environments, etc.) on several Asperger and related self-assess questionnaires.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#168

Post by nradov »

bagacrap wrote: post #41
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…

> 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…

That Gboard "feature" is extremely annoying because it's almost always wrong. This is another case where artificial intelligence ends up being worse than no intelligence.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#169

Post by baddox »

jdmichal wrote: post #144
baddox wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The idea is whether a human can tell the difference.

I know, that's why I'm saying the precise setup of the test is important. That's why, for instance, it's usually presented as a text messaging setup, because the goal is to test intelligence via language and conversation skills. A "face to face" setup wouldn't make much sense, unless we wanted to test that aspect of robotics.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#170

Post by opportune »

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…

This reminds me a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia also known as "face blindness". People with the disorder can see perfectly fine, but have trouble recognizing people's faces, just as your son hears just fine, but has trouble recognizing people's speech. Similarly, I know someone who beat brain cancer, but after a certain point he became unable to properly taste/enjoy food.

Interestingly, these disorders all seem to have pretty direct neurological causes: there is something causing a difference in the person's brain between where they sense the information and where they process it, whether it's genetic (i.e. affecting the layout and growth of the brain) or due to trauma such as a head injury.

I'm curious as to whether your son is able to enjoy music, especially music with multiple different instruments playing simultaneously. I have a theory that the same process on a neurological level that makes food pleasurable is what makes smells smell good, music sound good, certain surface (e.g. soft fur) feel good, and certain sights (e.g. a mountain stream) look good. I mean that not from a neurotransmitter perspective, but in the actual neural processing. It seems these configurations are programmed into our brains genetically, just as our propensity toward recognizing faces/speech are, which is fascinating.

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