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Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

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Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#11

Post by moconnor »

danShumway wrote: post #10

Google's speech-to-text is powerful, but I'd be pretty skeptical about tying a project to it given how services like Maps have been handled recently. There are companies like Mozilla trying to build more open solutions, but to the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I'm wrong) any pre-trained services Mozilla offers will also still involve you connecting to their servers. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I just ca…

Mozilla’s DeepSpeech is available as an offline pre-trained system for English.

The quality is far below Google’s speech API as the model is somewhat out of date and more importantly the training data set is much smaller and less general.

The best pretrained speech to text model I’ve seen is from Baidu’s DeepSpeech 2 repository. They provide pretrained models for English and Chinese based on their internal data. The quality is astonishingly good!

Edit: both of these models can be comfortably run in real-time on a desktop. At Arm I recently worked on a project to run <5% word error rate models in real-time on a mobile phone.

Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#12

Post by danShumway »

moconnor wrote: post #11
danShumway wrote: post #10

Google's speech-to-text is powerful, but I'd be pretty skeptical about tying a project to it given how services like Maps have been handled recently. There are companies like Mozilla trying to build more open solutions, but to the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I'm wrong) any pre-trained services Mozilla offers will also still involve you connecting to their servers. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I just ca…

Mozilla’s DeepSpeech is available as an offline pre-trained system for English. The quality is far below Google’s speech API as the model is somewhat out of date and more importantly the training data set is much smaller and less general. The best pretrained speech to text model I’ve seen is from Baidu’s DeepSpeech 2 repository. They provide pretrained models for English and Chinese based on their internal data. The…

I'm happy to be wrong about that; I was under the impression that DeepSpeech was available as a data set for training, but not as a trained system in and of itself.

My impression is that a lot of the hardware costs from modern AI comes from training and updating the model.

So (speaking as a non-expert) it doesn't seem like there's any technological problem with running a model locally on a private network -- you just need access to the model and you need someone else to generate it. And that's exactly what Google isn't providing. It's like they found a way to turn modern AI into even more of a black box.

At the point where I'm OK consuming someone else's model and not being able to control how it gets updated, then I'm probably also OK with using a compressed, static model and needing to occasionally download and deploy new versions.

Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#13

Post by oulipo »

If you want to build open-source, 100% on-device and private-by-design Voice assistants which can run on a Raspberry Pi, you can take a look at what we are building at https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder)

We want to make it possible to have embedded assistants in all your objects which preserve people privacy, and do this with open-source: https://medium.com/snips-ai/an-introduction-to-snips-nlu-the...

Take a look at our blog to get started in 1h: https://medium.com/snips-ai/voice-controlled-lights-with-a-r...

It also binds in popular Home automation platforms like Home Assistant and the Jeedom platform

Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#14

Post by CoffeeWidget »

oulipo wrote: post #13

If you want to build open-source, 100% on-device and private-by-design Voice assistants which can run on a Raspberry Pi, you can take a look at what we are building at https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) We want to make it possible to have embedded assistants in all your objects which preserve people privacy, and do this with open-source: https://medium.com/snips-ai/an-introduction-to-snips-nlu-the... Tak…

Hey I've been looking to order the Maker Kit. I found your videos to be really helpful in showing what Snips can do. My Alexa was acting off recently and these voice squatting scares are trending like wildfire.

You guys currently run a decentralized machine learning/data gen network for anyone to generate data for their app right?

Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#15

Post by zawerf »

Anyone know how this relates to the Web Speech API[1]?

Will they ship it with chrome to replace the existing speech synthesis api? (I believe right now it just uses whatever voices are available to the device or OS but chrome can fallback to a serverside voice)

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechSynth...

Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#16

Post by prestato »

oulipo wrote: post #13

If you want to build open-source, 100% on-device and private-by-design Voice assistants which can run on a Raspberry Pi, you can take a look at what we are building at https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) We want to make it possible to have embedded assistants in all your objects which preserve people privacy, and do this with open-source: https://medium.com/snips-ai/an-introduction-to-snips-nlu-the... Tak…

Does Snips support existing MQTT broker yet? Haven't checked up on development since late 2017.

Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#17

Post by bhishmaraj »

oulipo wrote: post #13

If you want to build open-source, 100% on-device and private-by-design Voice assistants which can run on a Raspberry Pi, you can take a look at what we are building at https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) We want to make it possible to have embedded assistants in all your objects which preserve people privacy, and do this with open-source: https://medium.com/snips-ai/an-introduction-to-snips-nlu-the... Tak…

Hey I’ve been working on a chatbot project lately and I came across semantic parsing (http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/wcmac/sippycup/blob/maste...) . Even Though we didn’t use it , I found it to be more robust and capable to handle very complicated utterances. The main disadvantage of using a grammar based approach is that it’s hard to extend the grammar to incorporate new intents and also creating a grammar is time consuming .

But the approach used in various NLU services such as Snips and RASA is much more simpler. This can work fine for easy queries but once we start asking complicated questions using conjunctions and disjunctions these systems start becoming brittle. If they try to capture all the possible logical forms through intents they’ll need an exponential number of intents and also a huge dataset to capture all the intents.

I would like to know your take on using a grammar based semantic parsing.

Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#18

Post by singularity2001 »

moconnor wrote: post #11
danShumway wrote: post #10

Google's speech-to-text is powerful, but I'd be pretty skeptical about tying a project to it given how services like Maps have been handled recently. There are companies like Mozilla trying to build more open solutions, but to the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I'm wrong) any pre-trained services Mozilla offers will also still involve you connecting to their servers. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I just ca…

Mozilla’s DeepSpeech is available as an offline pre-trained system for English. The quality is far below Google’s speech API as the model is somewhat out of date and more importantly the training data set is much smaller and less general. The best pretrained speech to text model I’ve seen is from Baidu’s DeepSpeech 2 repository. They provide pretrained models for English and Chinese based on their internal data. The…

> can be comfortably run in real-time on a desktop

that's progress. how long did it take you to get these things running (including downloads and dependency installation)?

Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#19

Post by pasta »

A friend is working for a newspaper. He records interviews.

We tried all the software we could find to turn the recording (Dutch) into text but there is nothing that gives a helpful result.

I know that a recording-to-text is different than speech-to-text but even when I use OK Google most of the time the results are horrible.

So after all those years I am still a little skeptical.

Re: Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

#20

Post by saas_co_de »

danShumway wrote: post #10

Google's speech-to-text is powerful, but I'd be pretty skeptical about tying a project to it given how services like Maps have been handled recently. There are companies like Mozilla trying to build more open solutions, but to the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I'm wrong) any pre-trained services Mozilla offers will also still involve you connecting to their servers. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I just ca…

It is also extremely expensive ($1.44/hr of audio) which really limits its potential. I looked at it for a project but it just didn't make sense.
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