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Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

opus-codec.org

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Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine Learning is Artificial Intelligence. Just look at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Many people are annoyed by the recent influx of calling everything "AI". Machine learning, statistical models, procedural generation, literally an usage of heuristics are all being called "AI" nowadays which obfuscates the "boring" nature in favor of "exciting buzzword" Selecting the quality of a video based on your download speed? That's "AI" now.

im quite tired of this. every snake oil shop now calls any algorithm "a i" to sound hip and sophisticated

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#32
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something you really shouldn’t spend any cycles worrying about.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as AI, is in fact, Machine Learning, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Machine Learning plus Traditional AI methods.

My point is very clearly that you should not spend any time or energy thinking about about the terminology.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#33
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opus isn’t patent free, and what’s worse it’s not particularly clear who owns what. The biggest patent pool is currently OpusPool but it’s not the only one. https://www.opuspool.com/

No codec (or any other technical development, really - edit: except for 20+ years old stuff, and only if you don't add any, even "obvious" improvements) is known patent free, or clear on "who owns what." Folks set up pools all the time, but somehow they never offer indemnification for completeness of the pool - because they can't. See https://en.kangxin.com/html/2/218/219/220/11565.html for a few examples how the pat…

No one said that Opus is the only one suffering from licensing ambiguity, but comparing it to say AptX and its variants which do have a clear one stop shop for licensing (Qualcomm) it’s a much riskier venture especially when it comes to hardware.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opus isn’t patent free, and what’s worse it’s not particularly clear who owns what. The biggest patent pool is currently OpusPool but it’s not the only one. https://www.opuspool.com/

No codec (or any other technical development, really - edit: except for 20+ years old stuff, and only if you don't add any, even "obvious" improvements) is known patent free, or clear on "who owns what." Folks set up pools all the time, but somehow they never offer indemnification for completeness of the pool - because they can't. See https://en.kangxin.com/html/2/218/219/220/11565.html for a few examples how the pat…

FWIW, submarine patents are long dead, so it is possible to feel assured that old enough stuff is patent free. Of course that denies a lot of important improvements, but due to diminishing returns and the ramp of tech development it's still ever more significant. A lot of key stuff is going to lose monopoly lock this decade.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#35
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't packet loss concealment (PLC) a form of hallucination? Not saying it's bad, just that it's still Making Shit Up™ in a statistically-credible way.

In a broader context, though, this happens all the time. You’d be surprised what people mishear in noisy conditions. (Or if they’re hard of hearing.) The only thing for it is to ask them to repeat back what they heard, when it matters. It might be an interesting test to compare what people mishear with and without this kind of compensation.

As part of the packet loss challenge, there was an ASR word accuracy evaluation to see how PLC impacted intelligibility. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/au...

The good news is that we were able to improve intelligibility slightly compared with filling with zeros (it's also a lot less annoying to listen to). The bad news is that you can only do so much with PLC, which is why we then pursued the Deep Redundancy (DRED) idea.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#36
post #27

I wonder: did they address common ML ethics questions? Specifically: Are the ML algorithms better/worse on male than on female speech? How about different languages or dialects? Are they specifically tuned for speech at all, or do they also work well for music or birdsong? That said, the examples are impressive and I can't wait for this level of understandability to become standard in my calls.

This is an important question. However, I'd like to point out that similar biases can easily exist for non-ML, hand-tuned algorithms. Even in the latter case test sets and often even "training" and "validation" sets are used for finding good parameters. Any of these can be a source of bias, as can the ears of evaluators making these decisions.

It's true that bias questions often come up in ML context because fundamentally these algorithms do not work without data, but _all_ algorithms are designed by people, and _many_ can involve data in setting their parameters. Both of which can be sources of bias. ML is more known for it, I believe, because the _inductive_ biases are less than in traditional algorithms, and therefore are more keen to adopt biases present in the dataset.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine Learning is Artificial Intelligence. Just look at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Many people are annoyed by the recent influx of calling everything "AI". Machine learning, statistical models, procedural generation, literally an usage of heuristics are all being called "AI" nowadays which obfuscates the "boring" nature in favor of "exciting buzzword" Selecting the quality of a video based on your download speed? That's "AI" now.

> Many people are annoyed by the recent influx of calling everything "AI".

Yes, that was the reason for my comment. :)

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#38
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't packet loss concealment (PLC) a form of hallucination? Not saying it's bad, just that it's still Making Shit Up™ in a statistically-credible way.

In a broader context, though, this happens all the time. You’d be surprised what people mishear in noisy conditions. (Or if they’re hard of hearing.) The only thing for it is to ask them to repeat back what they heard, when it matters. It might be an interesting test to compare what people mishear with and without this kind of compensation.

Right, this is why the Proper radio calls for a lot of systems have mandatory read back steps, so that we're sure two humans have achieved a shared understanding regardless of how sure they are of what they heard. It not only matters whether you heard correctly, it also matters whether you understood correctly.

e.g. train driver asks for an "Up Fast" block. His train is sat on Down Fast, the Up Fast is adjacent, so then he can walk on the (now safe) railway track and inspect his train at track level, which is exactly what he, knowing the fault he's investigating, was taught to do.

Signaller hears "Up Fast" but thinks duh, stupid train driver forgot he's on Down Fast. He doesn't need a block, the signalling system knows the train is in the way and won't let the signaller route trains on that section. So the Up Fast line isn't made safe.

If they leave the call here, both think they've achieved understanding but actually there is no shared understanding and that's a safety critical mistake.

If they follow a read-back procedure they discover the mistake. "So I have my Up Fast block?" "You're stopped on Down Fast, you don't need an Up Fast block". "I know that, I need Up Fast. I want to walk along the track!" "Oh! I see now, I am filling out the paperwork for you to take Up Fast". Both humans now understand what's going on correctly.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#39
post #27

I wonder: did they address common ML ethics questions? Specifically: Are the ML algorithms better/worse on male than on female speech? How about different languages or dialects? Are they specifically tuned for speech at all, or do they also work well for music or birdsong? That said, the examples are impressive and I can't wait for this level of understandability to become standard in my calls.

Quoting from our paper, training was done using "205 hours of 16-kHz speech from a combination of TTS datasets including more than 900 speakers in 34 languages and dialects". Mostly tested with English, but part of the idea of releasing early (none of that is standardized) is for people to try it out and report any issues.

There's about equal male and female speakers, though codecs always have slight perceptual quality biases (in either direction) that depend on the pitch. Oh, and everything here is speech only.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#40
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No codec (or any other technical development, really - edit: except for 20+ years old stuff, and only if you don't add any, even "obvious" improvements) is known patent free, or clear on "who owns what." Folks set up pools all the time, but somehow they never offer indemnification for completeness of the pool - because they can't. See https://en.kangxin.com/html/2/218/219/220/11565.html for a few examples how the pat…

No one said that Opus is the only one suffering from licensing ambiguity, but comparing it to say AptX and its variants which do have a clear one stop shop for licensing (Qualcomm) it’s a much riskier venture especially when it comes to hardware.

Making a patent troll is just a matter of putting up a press release and a web page.

I could claim to have a long list of patents against AptX. Anyone could.

Of course I'm not willing to disclose the list of patents at this time, but customers looking to be extorted may contact me privately.

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