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Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

stonetemple.com

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Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#61
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I think most of the work has been done in academia --- certainly that's where the recent deep learning stuff has come from. So, I don't think the important stuff is patented. (In general it's very hard to lock down ML improvements under patent. Once we can do it one way, and understand a little bit about what's working, we can usually replicate that performance with another technique.) The big problem for op…

First, these are two different problems to solve. Voice recognition and deep learning are different fields. Is training really the issue for voice recognition? It has been a problem that has almost been solved for over a decade. Last year I saw this impressive use of Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC, running in a VM on a Mac, that pretty much worked to code by voice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI Th…

...Of course deep learning is not voice recognition. But the most recent advances in speech recognition have been from deep learning models, which have come from academia.

The system in the video you link is single speaker, closed vocabulary. You need massive training data for multi-speaker, open vocabulary.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#62

Who owns the key patents for voice recognition - AT&T, Nuance, IBM? When will they be expire and be available for use in open-source speech recognition? Edit: some data at http://www.quora.com/Is-anyone-working-on-an-open-source-ver... & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4987875

A patent has a life of 19 years and after that companies use to revive a patent to block the competition. I dont think IBM or AT&T or any company will lose hold on any of their patents

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#64

Who owns the key patents for voice recognition - AT&T, Nuance, IBM? When will they be expire and be available for use in open-source speech recognition? Edit: some data at http://www.quora.com/Is-anyone-working-on-an-open-source-ver... & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4987875

A patent has a life of 19 years and after that companies use to revive a patent to block the competition. I dont think IBM or AT&T or any company will lose hold on any of their patents

Isn't there a 5-year limit on the extension?

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a second. Cups are a measure of volume and not weight, though. Grams is not the right unit to compare here.

There are approximate conversions for recipes, since many American recipes use volume measures and expect you to have measuring cups, while European recipes expect you to have a kitchen scale. But yes, there isn't any single conversion, since density varies: there's one cups/grams ratio for granulated sugar, one for powdered sugar, one for sifted flour, one for water, etc.

Which, as a geek, I find superconfusing and generally insane. I wish cooking was treated as chemistry (which it de facto is) and at least used precise units and proper measuring tools.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A patent has a life of 19 years and after that companies use to revive a patent to block the competition. I dont think IBM or AT&T or any company will lose hold on any of their patents

Isn't there a 5-year limit on the extension?

A maximum of 5 years can be restored to the patent.

In all cases, the total patent life for the product with the patent extension cannot exceed 14 years from the product’s approval date, or in other words, 14 years of potential marketing time. I

f the patent life of the product after approval has 14 or more years, the product would not be eligible for patent extension.

all regulatory periods are divided into a testing phase and an agency approval phase. The regulatory review period that occurs after the patent to be extended was issued is eligible to be counted towards the following calculation:

First, each phase of the regulatory review period is reduced by any time that the applicant did act not act with due diligence during that phase. The reduction in time would only occur after an FDA finding that the company did not act with due diligence.

Second, after any such reduction, one-half of the time remaining in the testing phase would be added to the time remaining in the approval phase to comprise the total period eligible for extension.

Third, all of the eligible period can be counted unless to do so would result in a total remaining patent term from the date of approval of a marketing application of more than fourteen years. An additional limitation on the period of extension is that the extension cannot exceed five years. For example, if an approved drug product which is eligible for the maximum of five years of extension had ten years of original patent term left at the end of its regulatory review period, then only four of the five years could be counted towards extension. The Patent Trademark Office is responsible for determining the period of extension.

you can read more here - http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/SmallBus...

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#67
A while back I created a toy IRC bot that answers questions like this just by searching reddit and taking the top comment. It works surprisingly well for questions that are likely to have been asked before. And when it does work, the result is much better than a dry wikipedia excerpt.

I then added some simple machine learning to filter search results for the most relevant threads which improved it quite a bit.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#68
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're looking for the answer to something quickly why would you want to have a back and forth game vs. just getting the answer immediately?

Questions are often ambiguous. "What's the population of New York?"

Google Now tells me the population of New York city, which is probably what most people want to know. If I wanted to know New York state I ask it again what is the population of New York state and it tells me. This is far better than every single query for what's the population of of New York asking to clarify if you mean city or state IMHO.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I think most of the work has been done in academia --- certainly that's where the recent deep learning stuff has come from. So, I don't think the important stuff is patented. (In general it's very hard to lock down ML improvements under patent. Once we can do it one way, and understand a little bit about what's working, we can usually replicate that performance with another technique.) The big problem for op…

> The big problem for open source speech recognition is training data. What exactly is needed for training - audio recordings with transcripts, human validation of recognized text? There are successful crowdsourced efforts for proofreading of OCR'ed text. Archive.org could host a CC-licensed archive of sound & transcripts. Recognition of the human voice is almost like writing, hopefully everyone could have access. Ed…

The more data the better although the relationship isn't linear.
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