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Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

sciencemag.org

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Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#61

Post by mLuby »

knzhou wrote: post #49
ilamont wrote: post #15

But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One…

I've known a lot of people that push podcasts, videos, and audiobooks to extreme speed. I knew a guy who'd turn video speed up to 8x so he could binge watch a season of generic anime in an hour flat. I knew a girl who'd get through paperback romance novels by scanning each page diagonally, in 10 seconds each. And here in this thread we have a lot of people bragging along the same lines. I just don't get the point. If…

I imagine it's a compromise between cutting through the fluff and using the primary source material.

You could just read the plot synopsis or watch the highlights, but sometimes those don't convey build-up, suspense, or other data that are hard to losslessly compress.

Being comfortable with the "boilerplate" of a given medium or genre usually lets you skim or skip it to jump right into the good stuff.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#62

Post by JackFr »

So basically human speech processing is a noisy channel which has limited bandwidth. If the language we encode in has a higher rate of compression, we need to transmit with fewer errors, but if it has a low rate of compression (or even redundancy) we can support a high rate of transmission and correct for more errors.

Which is kind of neat. Thank you Claude Shannon!

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#63

Post by liability »

knzhou wrote: post #49
ilamont wrote: post #15

But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One…

I've known a lot of people that push podcasts, videos, and audiobooks to extreme speed. I knew a guy who'd turn video speed up to 8x so he could binge watch a season of generic anime in an hour flat. I knew a girl who'd get through paperback romance novels by scanning each page diagonally, in 10 seconds each. And here in this thread we have a lot of people bragging along the same lines. I just don't get the point. If…

> . If you can process content much faster than it was meant to be played, it doesn't mean you're learning much faster than you could, it means the novel information density is low.

I 'read' your comment using TTS at 3x. What does that say about the information density of your comment?

(Little to nothing. TTS at that speed is still marginally slower that I normally read with my eyes. Human speech is generally much slower than is necessary to be understood.)

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#64

Post by SXX »

colechristensen wrote: post #55
SXX wrote: post #38

So here is my own experience. I was avid audio book fan for last 3 years and while ago some guy on reddit told me about how he listen books on Audible using high-speed option like 2.x. I never tried that before last summer since at higher speed speech become incomprehensible for me. What this guy told me is that it's just take time to adjust to it. So I basically started to listen for books at slightly higher speed.…

One thing I'd also like to develop / wish was integrated into audible and the like is silence trimming. Some speakers leave outsized pauses in their narration which can be significantly shortened effectively increasing speed with less distortion. I have the opposite problem where I have trouble paying attention to an audiobook at 1x. I get bored in between words and my mind wanders making it very difficult to keep tr…

> One thing I'd also like to develop / wish was integrated into audible and the like is silence trimming.

I don't really use audible, but if you looking for good audio player on Android here is one that can do this:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ph1b.audiob...

https://github.com/PaulWoitaschek/Voice

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#65

Post by impostir »

I would be interested if Rapid Serial Visual Presentation breaks this rule for any language. My guess is that it wouldn't, but I would be fascinated to find out. I would guess that languages with more general density of information per word would force the reader to slow their words per minute rate. Anecdotally, I can read with RSVP at around 620 words per minute in English and retain general comprehension. Sadly, I don't know another language well enough to compare that information with anything.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presenta...

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#66

Post by SXX »

bitwize wrote: post #47
SXX wrote: post #38

So here is my own experience. I was avid audio book fan for last 3 years and while ago some guy on reddit told me about how he listen books on Audible using high-speed option like 2.x. I never tried that before last summer since at higher speed speech become incomprehensible for me. What this guy told me is that it's just take time to adjust to it. So I basically started to listen for books at slightly higher speed.…

Blind people use screenreader software sped up so fast as to be indecipherable to untrained ears. The screenreader can give them near instantaneous feedback about where on the screen they are and what's there when it's so sped up, and with a bit of practice perceiving the sped-up speech imposes no burden at all.

I can tell from experience that when I lay down in my bed with my eyes closed I could comprehend speech at much higher speed than I would while walking on the street. No surprise blind people can handle it better even though I have no clue how exactly it work in relations to the brain.

I was always curios to make actual research / paper on this kind of thing, but as non-scientist I simply have no time to do so. So I happy someone actually doing it.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#67

Post by liability »

Swizec wrote: post #54
colechristensen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the speaker. Some speakers are particularly slow with lots of long pauses and others are faster. I think anyone can get to 3x but it takes some time to adjust to faster and faster speeds. It also depends on what you are doing while listening. Distractions or listening while doing something else (driving for example) lowers my ability to comprehend. For example on the interstate without much traffic I'll…

Overcast has a great feature where it cuts out pauses and otherwise leaves the speed intact. It easily speeds up podcasts by 30% and more

FYI if anybody is interested in doing this without an app, check out ffmpeg's silenceremove filter.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#68

Post by alperakgun »

knzhou wrote: post #49
ilamont wrote: post #15

But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One…

I've known a lot of people that push podcasts, videos, and audiobooks to extreme speed. I knew a guy who'd turn video speed up to 8x so he could binge watch a season of generic anime in an hour flat. I knew a girl who'd get through paperback romance novels by scanning each page diagonally, in 10 seconds each. And here in this thread we have a lot of people bragging along the same lines. I just don't get the point. If…

I think it depends on the speaker. I watch most videos at 1.5x speed, and some slow speakers with gaps at 2x.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#69

Post by liability »

saagarjha wrote: post #42
emilga wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a blind programmer using Visual Studio with a ridiculously fast TTS: https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc

I'm not blind, but I've tested some of my apps for VoiceOver and it's just utterly unusable with a "reasonable" speed. You have to pretty much set it to your reading speed for it to be useful, and that happens to be significantly faster than most people are comfortable speaking.

Start slow, and build up your tolerance to it overtime. If you try to jump into the deep end, you'll just make yourself disappointed.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#70

Post by saagarjha »

liability wrote: post #69
saagarjha wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not blind, but I've tested some of my apps for VoiceOver and it's just utterly unusable with a "reasonable" speed. You have to pretty much set it to your reading speed for it to be useful, and that happens to be significantly faster than most people are comfortable speaking.

Start slow, and build up your tolerance to it overtime. If you try to jump into the deep end, you'll just make yourself disappointed.

I'm reasonably good at listening to sped-up audio, personally, so this wasn't really an issue for me. I was just providing anecdotal reasoning of why TTS users may set their audio speed to something that might sound unreasonable: it takes forever to navigate the interface otherwise.
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