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Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

blogs.technet.com

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Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#21

Post by toemetoch »

nddrylliog wrote: post #20
toemetoch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a different note, imagine the power of this for DRM control and censorship. But impressive and very useful.

What? What do speech recognition and fingerprinting have in common? I don't see how this research applies for DRM... Censorship, maybe. And even then, you can't filter conversations in real-time, only maybe 'flag' people with forbidden words.

Pretty much all DRM content has unique patterns.

Want to prohibit videos of the Starcraft game? Simple search for a few sentences like "more vespene gas" and "require more minerals".

Want to find online copies of "Aliens"? Just enter a few catchphrases or part of a dialogue like "They come mostly at night. Mostly."

And even then, you can't filter conversations in real-time, only maybe 'flag' people with forbidden words.

Yes, that's really assuring to know it's not in real time.

Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#22

Post by mikedmiked »

Dn_Ab wrote: post #16

For those keeping score, google's image feature extractor shares the same core principles as microsoft's speech recognizer. EDIT: by keeping score I mean keeping track of which techniques are being used where.

What are these core principles?

Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#23

Post by acqq »

The most interesting bit for me is at the end of another blog entry:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/inside_microsoft_research/archive...

"An intern at Microsoft Research Redmond, George Dahl, now at the University of Toronto,

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gdahl/

contributed insights into the working of DNNs and experience in training them. His work helped Yu and teammates produce a paper called Context-Dependent Pre-trained Deep Neural Networks for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition.

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/144412/DBN4LVCSR-TransASL...

In October 2010, Yu presented the paper during a visit to Microsoft Research Asia. Seide was intrigued by the research results, and the two joined forces in a collaboration that has scaled up the new, DNN-based algorithms to thousands of hours of training data."

Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#24

Post by lt »

toemetoch wrote: post #21
nddrylliog wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? What do speech recognition and fingerprinting have in common? I don't see how this research applies for DRM... Censorship, maybe. And even then, you can't filter conversations in real-time, only maybe 'flag' people with forbidden words.

Pretty much all DRM content has unique patterns. Want to prohibit videos of the Starcraft game? Simple search for a few sentences like "more vespene gas" and "require more minerals". Want to find online copies of "Aliens"? Just enter a few catchphrases or part of a dialogue like "They come mostly at night. Mostly." And even then, you can't filter conversations in real-time, only maybe 'flag' people with forbidden wor…

Those don't really require textual matching, just regular audio fingerprinting. In fact, doing that would match Starcraft or movies podcasts, where people are quoting the source.

Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#25

Post by toemetoch »

lt wrote: post #24
toemetoch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all DRM content has unique patterns. Want to prohibit videos of the Starcraft game? Simple search for a few sentences like "more vespene gas" and "require more minerals". Want to find online copies of "Aliens"? Just enter a few catchphrases or part of a dialogue like "They come mostly at night. Mostly." And even then, you can't filter conversations in real-time, only maybe 'flag' people with forbidden wor…

Those don't really require textual matching, just regular audio fingerprinting. In fact, doing that would match Starcraft or movies podcasts, where people are quoting the source.

With audio fingerprinting the content provider must provide a way to fingerprint its own audio and have access to fingerprints of the internet's audio/video. This means a partnership between e.g. youtube and a studio. I'm fairly sure this involves studios above a certain size, resources for programming+API and a fair bit of paperwork and testing for robustness as there are ways to mess with the technique.

With this technique you just enter a few words and look at what comes out.

You're suggesting that the first option is easier?

Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#26

Post by lt »

toemetoch wrote: post #25
lt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those don't really require textual matching, just regular audio fingerprinting. In fact, doing that would match Starcraft or movies podcasts, where people are quoting the source.

With audio fingerprinting the content provider must provide a way to fingerprint its own audio and have access to fingerprints of the internet's audio/video. This means a partnership between e.g. youtube and a studio. I'm fairly sure this involves studios above a certain size, resources for programming+API and a fair bit of paperwork and testing for robustness as there are ways to mess with the technique. With this t…

Yes. Not only easier, but more reliable. The examples you gave are perfectly static sound bits - they don't change. It doesn't make sense to transcribe them to text, just match the audio. Soundhound/Shazam/etc do this easily. I'm pretty sure YouTube has some kind of similar mechanism already in place.

This technology gets a lot more interesting if you want to search for people talking about you or your products.

Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#27

Post by georgemcbay »

no_more_death wrote: post #19
kpozin wrote: post #5

The demo site ( http://www.msravs.com/audiosearch_demo/ ) blocks browsers other than IE and Firefox based on the user agent string. Use WebKit's developer tools to change your user agent and you'll be able to get in.

Why alienate such a large segment of users after pouring so much money into their technology? The web is getting weirder. If a company invests in multiple markets, they should be prepared to do well in some markets and badly in others. Bing isn't as good as Google. Android isn't as well-designed as Metro. Yes, Android stole Apple's market, and, yes, Apple stole someone else's market. The large technology companies ar…

I think you are attributing to malice what is probably just laziness. It is fairly common for modern websites to drop the ball on support of some browser or other. I doubt Microsoft as a corporation made a deliberate decision to support IE and Firefox but not Chrome or Safari or Opera or whatever.

Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#28

Post by Wilya »

tsumnia wrote: post #9

How does this compare to Microsoft's Old HTK (HMM Toolkit)? The language used on the website seems to point to a lot of the same things. Is this breaking it down to actual IPA phonemes? I'm mostly curious because I used the HTK for my thesis and would like to know how they compare (besides, one being just 'newer').

(I'm not an expert)

I think the HTK doesn't use neural networks at all. What it does is simply computes the MFCC of the sound signal and use it as input to a chain of HMM models. Well, "simply" that, plus the dozens of refinements and tweakings to make that work well.

Here, I guess they do some sort of preprocessing on the sounds features using their deep neural networks before feeding the whole thing to the HMMs.

Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#29

Post by epo »

no_more_death wrote: post #19
kpozin wrote: post #5

The demo site ( http://www.msravs.com/audiosearch_demo/ ) blocks browsers other than IE and Firefox based on the user agent string. Use WebKit's developer tools to change your user agent and you'll be able to get in.

Why alienate such a large segment of users after pouring so much money into their technology? The web is getting weirder. If a company invests in multiple markets, they should be prepared to do well in some markets and badly in others. Bing isn't as good as Google. Android isn't as well-designed as Metro. Yes, Android stole Apple's market, and, yes, Apple stole someone else's market. The large technology companies ar…

"Android stole Apple's market" eh? Must be why Apple is losing money hand over fist. Apple fans can be annoying but fandroids are often detached from reality.

Re: Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

#30

Post by rck »

breckinloggins wrote: post #14
cmicali wrote: post #8

Vlingo, Siri, and others have been doing speaker independent auto-adapting speech recognition for years and talking about systems requiring 'training' and improvements there sound like this article is 5 years old. Great to see innovation in this space but this article is very light on detail.

It is my understanding (albeit based on limited knowledge) that Siri, like other Nuance-powered systems that make a call to the server, are actually "trained" continuously by the huge amount of sample speech they receive by real users. The true "breakthrough" here would be if Microsoft made a voice recognition system that could run entirely on a device (no internet connection needed) and accurately understand speech…

I believe that in this system, "deep neural network" just means a regular feed-forward network that has a larger number of hidden layers. There is a relationship to DBNs though, because they initialize the weights of the neural net by doing unsupervised pre-training with a set of DBNs.
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