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Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

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Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#31

Post by reificator »

legohead wrote: post #14

been using Google Voice for several years now for most of my communications in text, email, slack, whatever (only on phone, of course). it is quite good, and very fast. but it's still not there. it has trouble with nuances like "call" vs "called" -- can't hear that suffix very well in regular speech. for me, it also has a really hard time with pronouns. many times I'll start off with regular speech, go to look at wha…

> been using Google Voice for several years now for most of my communications in text, email, slack, whatever (only on phone, of course).

Just a heads up, Google Voice is the name of a product that offers telephony service including SMS, and has been around for a decade or so.

https://www.google.com/voice

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#32

Post by moron4hire »

This is great. I've been working on voice systems for VR and AR applications. On the HoloLens, it's a dream once you have your entire interface speech enabled. Can't wait to start porting to Android. Daydream and ARCore apps are going to see a huge improvement.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#33

Post by p1esk »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #26
p1esk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that they're using RNN transducer. I thought everyone's moved to CNN lately.

CNN's are only mentioned because of potential processing considerations as computationally, they are easier to deal with. But given the nature of speech recognition, which is so highly temporally correlated, it shouldn't be a surprise that a recurrent neural network would be used. This is pretty much exactly the purpose the RNN type of model architecture was designed for. Also if you haven't looked into the propertie…

I take it you haven't been following the field lately, have you? It is surprising because convnets just work better for speech recognition ([1] is the latest SOA). I'm guessing gated convolutional LMs are slower than RNN transducers when deployed on mobile. Can someone confirm?

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06864

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#34

Post by maxxxxx »

melling wrote: post #2

"But it’s sort of funny considering hardly any of Google’s other products work offline. Are you going to dictate into a shared document while you’re offline? Write an email? Ask for a conversion between liters and cups? You’re going to need a connection for that!" While offline, you might write email drafts, your blog, or even a book: https://medium.com/@augustbirch/what-i-learned-writing-an-en... What's missing is t…

Google Maps has an excellent offline mode on iOS and Android. I wish Apple Maps had that too.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#35

Post by mellow-lake-day »

melling wrote: post #2

"But it’s sort of funny considering hardly any of Google’s other products work offline. Are you going to dictate into a shared document while you’re offline? Write an email? Ask for a conversion between liters and cups? You’re going to need a connection for that!" While offline, you might write email drafts, your blog, or even a book: https://medium.com/@augustbirch/what-i-learned-writing-an-en... What's missing is t…

For the record it wasn't always this way, the last couple of years though they have made a lot of improvements on this front. I think it may have something to do with Google's "next billion of devices" being in countries with bad connectivity.

With that said I especially like the Google Maps offline features which have been added recently. You can even have it calculate driving directions completely offline if you have the starting and ending addresses.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#38

Post by ohnoesjmr »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #24
melling wrote: post #2

"But it’s sort of funny considering hardly any of Google’s other products work offline. Are you going to dictate into a shared document while you’re offline? Write an email? Ask for a conversion between liters and cups? You’re going to need a connection for that!" While offline, you might write email drafts, your blog, or even a book: https://medium.com/@augustbirch/what-i-learned-writing-an-en... What's missing is t…

FWIW Google Translate (including the "translate from picture" feature) is an example of a product that has had offline option for quite some time. You have to tell it to download for each language pair IIRC.

Can't wait for different language models to be available to download for recognition, so one could have a genuine offline dictation between languages.

Re: Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

#40

Post by vsef »

p1esk wrote: post #33
lawrenceyan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CNN's are only mentioned because of potential processing considerations as computationally, they are easier to deal with. But given the nature of speech recognition, which is so highly temporally correlated, it shouldn't be a surprise that a recurrent neural network would be used. This is pretty much exactly the purpose the RNN type of model architecture was designed for. Also if you haven't looked into the propertie…

I take it you haven't been following the field lately, have you? It is surprising because convnets just work better for speech recognition ([1] is the latest SOA). I'm guessing gated convolutional LMs are slower than RNN transducers when deployed on mobile. Can someone confirm? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06864

The paper you site gets equal to SOA performance on Wall Street Journal and LibriSpeech test sets, both of which are clean, read speech, and not at all representative of what a phone or assistant recognizer deals with. The convnet described there also does not perform streaming recognition.

The primary reason to be interested in convnets for speech is computational parallelism, not because they have especially strong results for accuracy.

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