What's so special about it? Just tried this on the BlackBerry keyboard and there it works instantly without being connected to the internet as well.
Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
51–60 of 157 posts
Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Maps has an excellent offline mode on iOS and Android. I wish Apple Maps had that too.
If only it didn't force-expire downloaded maps after a while...
My offline maps expire in years, not in months or weeks. I'm not sure that's a huge issue, roads change over time and eventually maps will be so old that they are harmful.
Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
#53Just 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.
I doubt it.
I generally think of Google the same way I think of the NSA. If they stop doing something invasive, either it didn't work, they found a better way of doing it, or it was transferred to a legally distinct category, and we only hear about it because of PR considerations.
Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My first thought as well.
Typed from my s̶u̶r̶v̶e̶i̶l̶l̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶ smartphone.
Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take it you haven't been following the field lately, have you? It is surprising because convnets just work better for speech recognition ([1] is the latest SOA). I'm guessing gated convolutional LMs are slower than RNN transducers when deployed on mobile. Can someone confirm? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06864
The paper you site gets equal to SOA performance on Wall Street Journal and LibriSpeech test sets, both of which are clean, read speech, and not at all representative of what a phone or assistant recognizer deals with. The convnet described there also does not perform streaming recognition. The primary reason to be interested in convnets for speech is computational parallelism, not because they have especially strong…
I'm curious why people think that recurrent architectures are somehow more noise-tolerant. Where did this come from?
Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take it you haven't been following the field lately, have you? It is surprising because convnets just work better for speech recognition ([1] is the latest SOA). I'm guessing gated convolutional LMs are slower than RNN transducers when deployed on mobile. Can someone confirm? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06864
There is also the transformer approach (eventually with local attention to bound latency), (like I'm doing in my project (Work in Progress) : https://github.com/GistNoesis/Wisteria/blob/master/SpeechToT... ), though it's in the same line of thought as the convolutional CTC. The RNN-T is a nice idea though, if I understand it correctly it's another approach to the alignment problem. In CTC, you are generating sequence…
What is "convolutional CTC"?
Gated convolutions as LM is similar to RNN-T idea [1], but you have to deal with softmax, so I'm not sure how well this would work in practice, especially on a mobile processor.
Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
#57"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…
The offline aspect is hardly the main draw here though. As mentioned earlier in the article, the latency reduction is huge. Another aspect they didn't really cover is privacy implications. Lastly, you may not be offline, but dodgy connections can also be a pain if you need a stable stream of packets going back and forth.
Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The paper you site gets equal to SOA performance on Wall Street Journal and LibriSpeech test sets, both of which are clean, read speech, and not at all representative of what a phone or assistant recognizer deals with. The convnet described there also does not perform streaming recognition. The primary reason to be interested in convnets for speech is computational parallelism, not because they have especially strong…
I'm curious why people think that recurrent architectures are somehow more noise-tolerant. Where did this come from?
They're not that I know of. But the paper cited is just showing relative parity or slight improvement on relatively toy examples. The claim that convnets are the clear winner for speech in general/what everyone is doing now is just not true.
I work in the field, a more accurate summary would be that there are a number of viable architectures that currently get fairly similar accuracy, but that have other pros/cons with respect to streaming, memory use, parallelism, model size, integration with external language models and context, complexity of the decoder, friendliness to different types of hardware etc.
Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another benefit is privacy, this eliminates an entire set of potentially personal data from being handed off to Google.
I doubt it. I generally think of Google the same way I think of the NSA. If they stop doing something invasive, either it didn't work, they found a better way of doing it, or it was transferred to a legally distinct category, and we only hear about it because of PR considerations.
That's a pessimistic way of looking at it. Personally, from my experience, it's the exact opposite: If they're doing something invasive, it's because the data actually powers a feature so valuable that it's generally worth it.
Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)
#60I just switched my Pixel 1 to airplane mode and tried voice input. Sure enough, it worked offline and it was fast! Very impressive work. (I've tried that before, but in the past it could only understand a few special phrases.) I suppose this new feature came with the security update my phone downloaded a few days ago. There are lots of ways to spin this, but I see it as a significant improvement for any app that coul…
Unless you very recently (meaning today) accepted a download of a new language pack for English, it's likely just the old model, which is perfectly functional, while not being as accurate as the online version.
More specifically:
Gboard > Voice Typing > Faster voice typing
It says its an 85MB download for US-English