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Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

#21

Post by mkempe »

wpietri wrote: post #3
andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Google can't even get its demo text to speech to work - it's been offline for weeks https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/

Their user focus is shockingly poor. I followed the link from the blog post that said "check out the demo on our product website". Then there's a big button that says "TRY IT FREE". Good, I say. That leads me through a signup process that involves credit cards and whatnot, and then dumps me out on what I guess is the equivalent of the AWS console, not some nice audio test page. So then I root around in the console, f…

I've tried their transcription API. The quality is awful, to the point where the output of words is completely different depending on chopping off a few initial or trailing seconds of the audio at a time.

Thanks for "the squeaking of clown shoes". I'll have to remember that.

Re: Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

#22

Post by ClassyJacket »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #4

I wonder how much it will take until countries will require Telecom companies to transcribe and store all the phone calls for a "limited time period" of, let's say, 6 months, for "our security". And then run algorithms on these texts to classify the conversations into "potentially crime related discussions" classes.

The hard part isn't even me or you using end-to-end encrypted services, the hard part is getting the majority of people to care enough that they do.

Re: Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

#25

Post by flarg »

walterbell wrote: post #24

For offline use, a (paid) alternative is Nuance’s Dragon, https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html

I use this on a daily basis and it's pretty good but can't cope with fast speech or poor sound quality. For the price I don't expect more but it's not amazing.

Re: Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

#26

Post by gregsadetsky »

aviv wrote: post #10
tudorconstantin wrote: post #4

I wonder how much it will take until countries will require Telecom companies to transcribe and store all the phone calls for a "limited time period" of, let's say, 6 months, for "our security". And then run algorithms on these texts to classify the conversations into "potentially crime related discussions" classes.

Companies are already asking for this themselves. There's huge demand for all-calls voice transcription, and companies are willing to pay for it.

Do you know of specific demand? Would you mind contacting me (gs @ my HN username .com) to chat about this? Thanks!

Re: Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

#27

Post by wpietri »

anameaname wrote: post #19
wpietri wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their user focus is shockingly poor. I followed the link from the blog post that said "check out the demo on our product website". Then there's a big button that says "TRY IT FREE". Good, I say. That leads me through a signup process that involves credit cards and whatnot, and then dumps me out on what I guess is the equivalent of the AWS console, not some nice audio test page. So then I root around in the console, f…

This is what you get when you don't have a top-down management style. Teams are given too much freedom, leading to inconsistency. No one has the whole vision of how a product should work. Even if they did have that, they likely don't have the authority to make it happen.

I doubt it. If anything, I think this is likely to be a symptom of too much top-down power. It smacks of high-level mandates and checklist features. There's some boss with a made-up, can't-miss release date who doesn't really look very closely at what gets produced, just as long as he can tell his boss that things shipped on time and to spec.

I've worked with some great, highly autonomous teams. What makes them work well is a strong emotional and informational connection to users. They do lots of user testing, so they can get inside a user's head. They try things out themselves, using what they've learned from talking to those users. And they keep an eye on production usage, because they really care that what they make delivers value and gets used.

Re: Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

#28

Post by wpietri »

wpietri wrote: post #3
andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Google can't even get its demo text to speech to work - it's been offline for weeks https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/

Their user focus is shockingly poor. I followed the link from the blog post that said "check out the demo on our product website". Then there's a big button that says "TRY IT FREE". Good, I say. That leads me through a signup process that involves credit cards and whatnot, and then dumps me out on what I guess is the equivalent of the AWS console, not some nice audio test page. So then I root around in the console, f…

Update: I decided to try through the Google console, and also try Amazon's speech recognition through the AWS console.

AWS just let me transcribe my MP3 in a pretty straightforward way once I'd uploaded it to an S3 bucket. The transcript is done in 2-3x real time, and the quality seems decent. It comes as a complex JSON file with confidence numbers and timestamps for every word, with alternate words when it knows it isn't sure. It's pretty neat.

Google made me use a sort of query builder interface to construct an API request. The query builder did not actually match the features announced in the blog post, so I just tried going with what was there. When I eventually got a valid-looking request, it blew up because it turns out it can't parse MP3s. So then I reencoded to FLAC and uploaded that. I tried a variety of queries, but none of them worked. The one that got closest complained about a bad value for a field the query builder apparently would not let me add.

I gave up. Squeak, squeak, squeak!

And I should add that the people I know at Google are all perfectly smart, so I don't want anybody to think I'm saying that the individual engineers who made this are dumb or bad. This seems like a giant organizational failure, where what gets built is deeply disconnected from user need and the lived user experience.

Normally when I get insight on a place where this happens, the priority is not actually delivering value, but making managers look good according to easily measured but harmful metrics, like, "Are we at competitive parity at a feature checklist level?" or "Did we launch by some made-up deadline so that a manager could claim success?"

If anybody at Google wants to send me their horror stories, please do email or DM me on Twitter. I'd love to know what the hell happened here, and I promise to keep things as confidential as you like.

Re: Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

#29

Post by jgh »

wpietri wrote: post #28
wpietri wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their user focus is shockingly poor. I followed the link from the blog post that said "check out the demo on our product website". Then there's a big button that says "TRY IT FREE". Good, I say. That leads me through a signup process that involves credit cards and whatnot, and then dumps me out on what I guess is the equivalent of the AWS console, not some nice audio test page. So then I root around in the console, f…

Update: I decided to try through the Google console, and also try Amazon's speech recognition through the AWS console. AWS just let me transcribe my MP3 in a pretty straightforward way once I'd uploaded it to an S3 bucket. The transcript is done in 2-3x real time, and the quality seems decent. It comes as a complex JSON file with confidence numbers and timestamps for every word, with alternate words when it knows it…

I keep harping on this about google, but this is so typical of google. It's the same kinda crap with WebRTC, QUIC, VP9/Webm. The one complete WebRTC lib is dug out of Chromium. QUIC, last I checked, is buried in Chromium. VP9/Webm doesn't actually support transparency but Google went and added a custom extension to support it (in Chromium) and so anybody that wants to support alpha with VP9 needs to do it Google's nonstandard way (including adding Google code to FFmpeg to do it).

They just throw stuff that would otherwise be useful to the world out there in the least user-friendly way possible. And then they make a big PR push for a while talking about how great the new thing is and then they forget about it and the project languishes.

Re: Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

#30

Post by mkempe »

mkempe wrote: post #21
wpietri wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their user focus is shockingly poor. I followed the link from the blog post that said "check out the demo on our product website". Then there's a big button that says "TRY IT FREE". Good, I say. That leads me through a signup process that involves credit cards and whatnot, and then dumps me out on what I guess is the equivalent of the AWS console, not some nice audio test page. So then I root around in the console, f…

I've tried their transcription API. The quality is awful, to the point where the output of words is completely different depending on chopping off a few initial or trailing seconds of the audio at a time. Thanks for "the squeaking of clown shoes". I'll have to remember that.

Let me rephrase that for the haters: the quality of that transcription API was godawful.

I took a ten minute audio segment from a two-person interview, and chopped it up in shorter segments to fit under the 60-second limit, with varying overlap durations to make sure that full sentences would be included on either side of the snip. I ran a battery of tests with segments of 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and overlaps of 3s, 5s, and 10s. The output was essentially useless garbage, with wild differences in the transcription depending on segment lengths and overlap durations. In one configuration one sentence may be perfectly transcribed and the next was word salad, in another both sentences were useless salads, in another half of each sentence was right but words were missing, etc. No configuration ever yielded a useful output. Time and money spent: several hours, $$$.

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