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Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

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Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#191

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> After playing him a bunch of audio with missing words, the lady who tested him was blown away by how smart he is - explaining that he is quickly filling in almost every missing word based by guessing from all thing possible things it could be, narrowing it down on context and getting it right. I guess that is a normal, all day long task for him.

Sure it is; it's an essential part of speech recognition for all humans.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#193

Post by averagewall »

MereInterest wrote: post #95
squeaky-clean wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Humans make those mistakes too. Once, while talking to somebody about money, I asked "do you know what inflation is?", meaning what the rate is,to help make a decision, but they were offended and replied that yes, of course they knew what the concept meant.

Having a "the" in there like you did should remove ambiguity though. I guess Google Maps defers to Wikipedia when it doesn't know what a term means.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#194

Post by mickronome »

noir_lord wrote: post #147
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.

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.

One the pillars of psychiatrical diagnosis according so doctors I met, is that any kind of diagnosis or treatment is only to be judged by its ability to improve your quality of life.

If you don't suffer in any way shape or form, it doesn't matter how many boxes you tick, if you feel fine there is no compelling reason to go through with diagnosis, except possibly if you have kids.

Autism spectrum disorders are quite heritable, and it's a tremendous advantage to be aware of ones own psychiatric oddities when you raise a child with his or her own. I speak from experience, I wish I known about my ADHD-PI/ADD with a dash of Autism earlier. I am however very happy I got to know about it early enough to help me guide my daughter into a way of thinking that has helped her a lot.

In general, without the knowledge that people on average might have a WILDLY different cognitive landscape than yours, it's very very hard to know which advice to take to heart, and what to completely ignore.

With that said, I'm fairly well aware of what type of questions are on those questionnaires. If the test is legitimate, a result that high over the limit would probably include at least a few 'yes' answers to questions that usually have a negative impact of quality of life.

Adding to that, in my experience people actually on the spectrum are the least likely to self diagnose prematurely, even when the answer is essentially staring them in the face.

Anything that can improve quality of life a little is worth considering, because sometimes it's really hard to judge the magnitude of how it can help.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#195

Post by allenleee »

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…

Open source speech recognition on Github:

1. speech-to-text-wavenet (https://github.com/buriburisuri/speech-to-text-wavenet)

2. kaldi(https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi)

3. Speech recognition module for Python (https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition)

4. DeepSpeech(https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech)

5. Natural Language Processing Tasks and References(https://github.com/Kyubyong/nlp_tasks)

FYI.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#196

Post by charlysl »

It seems to me that much of this can be explained by one of the fundamental principles of machine learning:

Training and test samples must be iid (ie independently sampled from the same distribution) to get good performance. Otherwise there is bias.

This applies not only to speakers as individuals, but to all the other factors mentioned, like context, bg noise, gender, age, accent, education, mike, emotion, etc etc.

Many of the issues described can be traced down to this principle.

This is why, possibly, the core issue is data.

Although models and *PUs matter too, the theoretical performance boundary dependends on data quality only (with a model to match).

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#197

Post by KGIII »

akvadrako wrote: post #94
ImSkeptical wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am famous to maybe six people. So, it's not much. However, I wanted to add an account to this.

I can tell you the exact moment, problem, response, and teacher - that changed my life forever. It was at that single moment that I understood mathematics. I wasn't suddenly good at it. No, I still pretty much sucked at math. But, I understood it was a language and it was descriptive.

Many years later, that same teacher would be there to help me celebrate defending my dissertation. I didn't actually march, I was already to busy by the time spring rolled around. He's an old man, now. I still stop in and we are still fast friends.

That one comment changed my life. There's a not insignificant chance that it has had a small impact on your life, assuming you've been impacted by modern traffic engineering, or in some pedestrian venues, or had some goods delivered. All that from a single comment that is entirely obvious, in retrospect.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#198

Post by sdrothrock »

magicalhippo wrote: post #163
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 grandp…

I'm half-deaf with a cochlear implant; context switching is incredibly difficult! I've had similar problems where I assume someone is speaking either Japanese or English and "filter" accordingly.

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#199

Post by [deleted] »

mintplant wrote: post #56
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…

Speech synthesis is in a similar situation. The FOSS options that I know of are completely primitive compared to their proprietary counterparts, particularly those locked away behind the cloud. Unfortunately this area seems to receive much less attention than speech recognition (AFAIK it's a non-goal of the Mozilla project, for example).

[deleted]

Re: Speech Recognition Is Not Solved

#200

Post by tanilama »

Technically yes. But in the realm of application, it is mature enough that people can use some drop-in solution, without too much tuning, and get passable result.

It is like say Web Application is not solved. Surely, it is not. But the remaining part falls into the arts category, while the hard barrier of the technologies itself is no longer there.

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