Can we all just drop the charade and start calling Watson SkyNet already?
New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
101–110 of 110 posts
Re: New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
#102The text-to-speech is surprisingly good, but I'm amazed at one thing, and not in a good way: the Spanish voice can't pronounce the word "Español". It pronounces it as "Espanol" with a hard "n" sound. In fact, it seems to pronounce all "ñ"s as "n"s. How that kind of an oversight got into the system, I'll never know. Did no one think to check?
Edit: And to add insult to injury, the English voices do pronounce "Español" correctly!
Re: New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
#103Some context on the new services. They are built on technology that comes from IBM Research and has been moved into the Watson group in 2014. Some like speech, have been developed for more than 50 years. None of these technologies have overlap with the Watson Jeopardy stack (except for the Watson voice). We will release that stack later this year as a series of services allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog applica…
Great, I'm waiting for it, actually I can't do so much with the preloaded domain on Q&A service.
Re: New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
#104Don't pay a company to do what can be done with a library.
Re: New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
My evidence is anecdotal at best, but I have found Siri to be terrible and my "OK, Google" to be wonderful.
Siri was completely unusable/unresponsive from 2011/2012, but then, somewhere around 2012/2013, started to become pretty good (most of the time) for things like, "Wake me up at 6:30 AM" - I used it for that type of query a lot. Dictation, though, was spotty - I would say about 10-20% of the time, I just got a spinning non-response, and even when it did work, it would be slow, and the results would be iffy. And, once…
My understanding is that it is acoustic modeling that was drastically improved using deep learning. That is, while speech recognition improved, acoustic modeling improved more. So, strictly speaking, technology is now better at ignoring noise, rather than better at understanding speech. Of course, to users, there is no difference.
Re: New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the documentation[1], it's a concatenative synthesizer using decision trees for prosody modeling and PSOLA for output. [1]: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
Thanks! I am working in this area and have some ideas for deep learning type methods which move away from concatenative synthesis. It will be nice to compare to what they are using.
This paper (from ICASSP2013) may be of interest to you: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Re: New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
#107Compare the Watson text-to-speech voices with Nuance ... Watson http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/ Nuance http://www.nuance.com/for-business/text-to-speech/vocalizer/... I prefer the Watson version voicing a sample paragraph. Both are good enough for an application that selects on price. For a voice-first application, maybe Watson is better for TTS. For speech to text, Nuance has been the leader, e.g. Apple's…
For TTS, compare further with Vocalware and CereProc Vocalware https://www.vocalware.com/index/demo CereProc https://www.cereproc.com/ It is getting increasingly difficult to pick one as the clear leader for "natural sounding". The results are good enough for voicing canned text, and certainly better enunciated than many thick-accented English speakers. Improvements through training can still be made in parsing the t…
SSML is a speech synthesis markup language that has some degree of popularity in the field. The specific section on markup for emphasis is http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis11/#S3.2
Re: New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the documentation[1], it's a concatenative synthesizer using decision trees for prosody modeling and PSOLA for output. [1]: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
Thanks! I am working in this area and have some ideas for deep learning type methods which move away from concatenative synthesis. It will be nice to compare to what they are using.
We did some work on applying NNs to prosody prediction; see Fernandez, Raul, et al. "Prosody contour prediction with long short-term memory, bi-directional, deep recurrent neural networks." Proceedings of the Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH). 2014.
Re: New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
#109The text-to-speech is surprisingly good, but I'm amazed at one thing, and not in a good way: the Spanish voice can't pronounce the word "Español". It pronounces it as "Espanol" with a hard "n" sound. In fact, it seems to pronounce all "ñ"s as "n"s. How that kind of an oversight got into the system, I'll never know. Did no one think to check? Edit: And to add insult to injury, the English voices do pronounce "Español"…
Fixed.
Re: New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more
#110Some context on the new services. They are built on technology that comes from IBM Research and has been moved into the Watson group in 2014. Some like speech, have been developed for more than 50 years. None of these technologies have overlap with the Watson Jeopardy stack (except for the Watson voice). We will release that stack later this year as a series of services allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog applica…
Are you working on any audio (non-speech) analysis services? I have no particular usecase in mind, but it's an area I'm always interested in!
You might want to check out Echonest's API - http://developer.echonest.com/