Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by ahicks » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #199

ahicks wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other people in realtime aren't...I guess the best way I have to put it is informationally sparse. There's a lot going on beside what's being said in conversation. Synths don't imply things for example; in a context with active implication slowing/pausing the synth is sometimes necessary. The skill doesn't extend beyond the blatant transfer of information. In social contexts and especially when you can't go off any v…

This is fascinating; thank you. How does an audio book read by the author, such as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential , which contains autobiographical information, compare? Is it more like a social situation that you need real time to absorb, or do you prefer it at a higher speed? How does a stage play compare? Do you watch movies sped up? Also, how does your "baud" vary with your familiarity with the ideas? I…

I haven't specifically tried different types of audiobooks to see if there's some preferred category.

With movies I don't bother with them unless they have descriptive audio, at which point you've got music, sound effects, and two somewhat parallel speech streams going on. That's high informational content.

I did an entire CS degree at 800 words a minute. I program in any programming language you care to name (including the initial learning) at that speed as well. For more complicated concepts I stay at that speed, but pause after every paragraph or so to chunk the content as needed. I'm doing this thread at that speed. Pretty much the only time I slow it down is pleasure reading or sometimes articles when i want to go off and do chores while I listen, but even then it's still faster than human speech.

In general i think answering these sorts of questions needs research that we don't have to my knowledge. Nothing in my personal experience or background really allows me to give you good definitive answers. The sample size to work with is pretty small and in all honesty there's not a lot of good research around blindness day-to-day in the first place.

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

#252

Post by CAMLORN » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 4:21 PM UTC

tripzilch wrote: post #235

ahicks wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I'm at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out at 1219. 800 or so is the norm among programmers. In order to get it we normally end up using older synths which sound way less natural because modern synthesis techniques can't go that fast. There's a trade-off between natural sounding and 500+ words a minute, and…

Are old speech synths not harsh on the ears to listen for longer periods? Or maybe I'm just familiar with the super robotic ones (I like them for music production). If so, have you considered using an EQ plugin to maybe turn down the harsher high frequencies a few notches? Just a thought.

They're harsh. But you get used to it in about a week. Espeak is an atypically bad example, which is why NVDA experimented with a fork (and maybe one day the NVDA work will make it upstream). part of what allows them to stay intelligible is the harshness. I've never tried passing one through an EQ but there are already pitch settings and similar to play with, and given that even not wearing headphones slows me down I expect that an EQ would probably be bad for it.

But more to the point there is nowhere to really plug that in to a screen reader, so we can't try it anyway. The audio subsystems of most screen readers are much less advanced than you'd think.

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

#253

Post by CAMLORN » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

warpech wrote: post #206

shakna wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it'd be legal for me to hand you an espeak recording, but it works fine at 800WPM. espeak -s 800 "Things to say."

Here's an online version, I bet it sounds similar as the original program: https://eeejay.github.io/espeak/emscripten/espeak.html There is a range slider that maxes as 450, which is the maximum speed according to the manual. I tried listening to a Wikipedia article at 450, I am so amazed you can comprehend that. Perhaps that's equivalent of me visually scanning the text instead of reading, however when I do that, I t…

Screen readers have a lot of commands for reading different sized chunks of content. In general there's probably around 50 keystrokes I use on a daily basis. It's not as straightforward as reading from top to bottom, though it can be. I can usually do a Wikipedia article without pausing at 450 or so.

If anyone is curious, here is the NVDA keystroke reference: https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvdaTracAttachments/455/keyco...

As an interesting sidenote, screen readers have to co-opt capslock as a modifier key, then there's fun with finding keyboards that are happy to let you hold capslock+ctrl+shift+whatever.

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

#254

Post by CRConrad » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #243

tralarpa wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you Danish? (your account name looks rather Dutch) I always wanted to know whether it's true what I heard some years ago: a friend told me that older Danish people are complaining that the younger Danish are harder to understand because there has been a trend in recent decades to swallow consonants even more than in the past (that's something hard to image for me as a non-Danish speaker :)

No, I'm Dutch like you guessed. While the Netherlands and Denmark are very similar in some aspects (flat countries obsessed with having the best bike infrastructure in the world) the language is quite different ;) Living in Malmö I also find this quite hard to believe! Besides, isn't old people complaining about the younger generation butchering their language something that happens all the time in all cultures?

This is vague, because it was long ago, but I remember reading an article in a newspaper (Dagens Nyheter, Sweden, IIRC) in... Oh, the 1990s, I think.

It was about how Danish linguists were worried about how the language was getting more unintelligible. The example I remember was about the ever-increasing number of words that are pronounced, basically, “lää'e”: läkare, läge, läger, lager... Those are written in Swedish here; some Dane may translate. (In English: healer, situation, camp [laager], layer...) There were more that I don't remember; in all, I think they mentioned at least half a dozen words that had become basically indistinguishable from each other.

I don't think serious linguists have had the same fear about most other languages.

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

#255

Post by EpicEng » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #185

lenepp wrote: post #174

Apologies for being harsh, but this kind of thing is the phrenology of our time. I know it's utterly conventional to think this way about language in some circles that present themselves as doing legitimate science, but the view that you can calculate the amount of information in human speech, except in a super-technical sense that doesn't match any of the reporting on this study or the way people are interpreting it…

They aren't talking about the semantic information of the word "trump". They explain the methodology for calculating information, and it's per syllable (based on the number of distinct syllables that are part of the language's phonetics). So, for English speakers, 'trump' has exactly 7 bits in it. That exact syllable may or may not exist in another language, but if so the same singly syllabic word "trump" would have…

>Maybe next time RTA?

I think it's you that has missed the point. Syllables have a very loose correlation to information. So great; we can stream out 39bits worth of syllables / second. In what way does that describe how information dense those syllables are? Context matters here.

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

#256

Post by rtkwe » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #255

bagacrap wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't talking about the semantic information of the word "trump". They explain the methodology for calculating information, and it's per syllable (based on the number of distinct syllables that are part of the language's phonetics). So, for English speakers, 'trump' has exactly 7 bits in it. That exact syllable may or may not exist in another language, but if so the same singly syllabic word "trump" would have…

>Maybe next time RTA? I think it's you that has missed the point. Syllables have a very loose correlation to information. So great; we can stream out 39bits worth of syllables / second. In what way does that describe how information dense those syllables are? Context matters here.

I think the fact that context matters so much is why we don't try to quantify it. The word 'trump' can covey a lot of meaning or next to nothing, eg in a card game the word trump can covey a lot of information about the state of play and your reaction to it to your competitors. It doesn't take any longer to say and in the context of the game may take less time to think up as well.

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

#257

Post by not_a_cop75 » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 8:03 PM UTC

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…

Probably this is a healthy reminder of how the brain optimizes and uses sections of itself. Without the need for vision, those cranial areas can be better used for other things.

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

#258

Post by bagacrap » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 4:25 AM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #255

bagacrap wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't talking about the semantic information of the word "trump". They explain the methodology for calculating information, and it's per syllable (based on the number of distinct syllables that are part of the language's phonetics). So, for English speakers, 'trump' has exactly 7 bits in it. That exact syllable may or may not exist in another language, but if so the same singly syllabic word "trump" would have…

>Maybe next time RTA? I think it's you that has missed the point. Syllables have a very loose correlation to information. So great; we can stream out 39bits worth of syllables / second. In what way does that describe how information dense those syllables are? Context matters here.

The researchers are not making any claims wrt semantic information density.

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

#259

Post by tripzilch » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 10:46 AM UTC

mizaru wrote: post #236

tripzilch wrote: post #234

Claude Shannon (of the information theory fame) did a similar research with his 1951 paper "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English". He used a particularly clever idea, leaving out words or letters from English text, he then measured how accurately people could predict the missing text. And then used those numbers for statistical information-theoretical analysis to estimate the information density at about 9-11 bi…

Looked it up, 11.82 bits per word, 2.62 bits per letter.

Oh! Yes you're right. My mistake. That makes a lot more sense too, it would be weird if a letter was more bits than a byte, hm? :-)

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

#260

Post by modsiw » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

ahicks wrote: post #157

ahicks wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I'm at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out at 1219. 800 or so is the norm among programmers. In order to get it we normally end up using older synths which sound way less natural because modern synthesis techniques can't go that fast. There's a trade-off between natural sounding and 500+ words a minute, and…

And as a followup to that--because really this is the weird part--some circles of blind people (including mine) talk faster between ourselves. That's not common, but it happens. I still sometimes have to remember that other people can't digest technical content at the rate I say it and remember to slow down. A good way to bring it out is to have me try to explain a technical concept that I understand really well. I h…

I don’t think this is a blind person thing. Ask any nerd about something they’re into, and you stand a pretty good chance of receiving a firehouse of words representing their steam of consciousness.