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Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

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Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#21

Post by lallysingh »

dotdi wrote: post #7

Call me cynical but I cannot picture Google not tapping into everything you run through their voice recognition software, even if it does work offline. Doesn't mean it won't phone home later.

For what? They only really make their money on ads for things you're actively searching for. Everything else they have in ads works rather poorly in the text world. Trying to interpret interests out of task-driven voice commands is way beyond their capabilities.

But, enough of that. I'm holding out until decent voice dictation is standard everywhere and a well understood engineering problem with good open source implementations.

Mostly so I don't have to type address into my car's GPS.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#22

Post by penagwin »

Someone1234 wrote: post #15
penagwin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another benefit is privacy, this eliminates an entire set of potentially personal data from being handed off to Google.

I'm unclear on if this moves the privacy needle. It says they do offline translation, but they still may attempt to send the audio clip to compare with the resulting text translation. It could be used to improve privacy, I just don't know if it will be used that way.

To me it's clear that this is in it's early phases, and as it's only available on Pixel devices and not to the general public I think it's safe to say this is part of it's testing.

However, as you said, if this is always a requirement then it doesn't affect privacy at all, which to me would be a real shame but this is Google after all. We just have to wait and see for now.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#23

Post by penagwin »

snaky wrote: post #18
penagwin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but once this is implemented there is no excuse for audio to be "sent home". Of course there will still be usage analytics, etc. But it does increase privacy to some degree, especially when compared to sending all audio after a certain phrase is mentioned.

Google does not need any excuse.

They do need an excuse, however most likely it will be "to further improve our models with more data", which could certainly be true, much to all of our distaste.

We have to wait and see. I'm sure we all look forward to a completely offline solution.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#24

Post by semi-extrinsic »

melling wrote: post #2

"But it’s sort of funny considering hardly any of Google’s other products work offline. Are you going to dictate into a shared document while you’re offline? Write an email? Ask for a conversion between liters and cups? You’re going to need a connection for that!" While offline, you might write email drafts, your blog, or even a book: https://medium.com/@augustbirch/what-i-learned-writing-an-en... What's missing is t…

FWIW Google Translate (including the "translate from picture" feature) is an example of a product that has had offline option for quite some time. You have to tell it to download for each language pair IIRC.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#25

Post by pakl »

p1esk wrote: post #19
modeless wrote: post #6

Google AI blog: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-sp... arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06621

Interesting that they're using RNN transducer. I thought everyone's moved to CNN lately.

Feedforward CNNs cannot tolerate as much noise and real-world variability as RNNs.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#26

Post by lawrenceyan »

p1esk wrote: post #19
modeless wrote: post #6

Google AI blog: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-sp... arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06621

Interesting that they're using RNN transducer. I thought everyone's moved to CNN lately.

CNN's are only mentioned because of potential processing considerations as computationally, they are easier to deal with. But given the nature of speech recognition, which is so highly temporally correlated, it shouldn't be a surprise that a recurrent neural network would be used. This is pretty much exactly the purpose the RNN type of model architecture was designed for.

Also if you haven't looked into the properties of how exactly a RNN Transducer functions, I highly recommend doing so. They help resolve a great deal of problems that traditional RNNs and CNNs are unable to deal with.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#27

Post by usrusr »

penagwin wrote: post #12
Someone1234 wrote: post #4

Just to be clear: This has nothing to do with "Wake Words" (e.g. OK Google, Alexa, Hey Siri, etc) which have always been handled offline/locally. This is translating what you said after the wake word from voice to text on the local [Pixel] hardware rather than sending it into Google's Cloud. The biggest benefits here are speed and reliability. It could also handle some actions offline.

Another benefit is privacy, this eliminates an entire set of potentially personal data from being handed off to Google.

On the other hand, when you can transcribe locally, uploading whole days worth of eavesropping would not cause a noticeable spike in traffic. I'd consider it more a lateral change than an improvement.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#29

Post by adrianmonk »

dotdi wrote: post #7

Call me cynical but I cannot picture Google not tapping into everything you run through their voice recognition software, even if it does work offline. Doesn't mean it won't phone home later.

That seems orthogonal to this anyway. If they wanted to tap into what you're saying, why not just upload the text? It's both smaller and more useful. And more general because you get the data regardless of how the user chose to input it.

And if you're uploading the text, then it doesn't really matter where the speech to text translation happens.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#30

Post by p1esk »

pakl wrote: post #25
p1esk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that they're using RNN transducer. I thought everyone's moved to CNN lately.

Feedforward CNNs cannot tolerate as much noise and real-world variability as RNNs.

Citation?
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