14 ms·

Google opens access to its speech recognition API

605 points by jstoiko 11y ago

theseatoms 11y ago
Key sentence: > The Google Cloud Speech API, which will cover over 80 languages and will work with any application in real-time streaming or batch mode, will offer full set of APIs for applications to “see, hear and translate,” Google says.
saurik 11y ago
I think this more directly competes with the IBM Watson speech API, not Nuance?
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Not sure how many users of IBM speech API but Nuance is big in this area (also offers offline conversion products)
- jonknee 11y ago
  Why? This is almost exactly what Nuance provides: https://developer.nuance.com/public/index.php?task=memberServices https://developer.nuance.com/public/index.php?task=memberSer...
  - swah 11y ago
    I wanted to see if there was good speech recognition and could Google about Nuance... Now that its going to be "disrupted" I found out about it.. ironic. Try Googling "speech recognition api"...
- Spooky23 11y ago
  IBM's offering is using the nuance engine, with Watson using its magic to make more accurate predictions based on context.
  - chetatkinsdiet 11y ago
    IBM split from Nuance a year or so ago- it's now its own engine.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Well NUAN took a 5% price hit after the announcement today, so maybe there's some overlap?
CaveTech 11y ago
> To attract developers, the app will be free at launch with pricing to be introduced at a later date. Doesn't this mean you could spend time developing and building on the platform without knowing if your application is economically feasible? Seems like a huge risk to take for anything other than a hobby project.
- sologoub 11y ago
  I was really hoping they would post at least a preview of what the pricing will be. AppEngine pricing change resulted in a nasty surprise for a lot of people and a lot of vitriol towards Google. Just one article on this from many: http://readwrite.com/2011/09/02/google-app-engine-pricing-ange/ http://readwrite.com/2011/09/02/google-app-engine-pricing-an... While the platform has moved way ahead of where it was in 2011, the memory of this is still in the back of people's mind and it would be a good move on Google's part to at least try to engender more trust by giving directional pricing.
  - mianos 11y ago
    It is funny reading this in hindsight. We went straight to AWS, also for long running tcp connections, and never looked at it again. After that I have never recommended app engine.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    Wasn't that five years ago? When it came out of preview (and prices were expected to change)?
    - sologoub 11y ago
      It was - 2011 is mentioned in both article and my comment. I just wish Google wouldn't bring back memories of that by not disclosing pricing of a very promising API. GAE has moved quite far ahead since then, but many people still won't consider it after the bad experience. Perceptions die hard...
      - deleted 11y ago
blennon 11y ago
This is HUGE in my opinion. Prior to this, in order to get near state-of-the-art speech recognition in your system/application you either had to have/hire expertise to build your own or pay Nuance a significant amount of money to use theirs. Nuance has always been a "big bad" company in my mind. If I recall correctly, they've sued many of their smaller competitors out of existence and only do expensive enterprise deals. I'm glad their near monopoly is coming to an end. I think Google's API will usher in a lot of new innovative applications.
- ericflo 11y ago
  Interesting - I saw this as a defensive response to the rising number of developers using Amazon's Alexa APIs, rather than anything related to Nuance.
  - dharma1 11y ago
    It's probably been on their roadmap for a while, before Alexa came out. Re: Alexa/echo - think there is an opportunity for someone to manufacture cheap USB array mics for far field capture. Still, having this paid and cloud based puts a limit to types of things where you'd use it. I will use it in my own apps for now but will swap to a OSS speech recognition library running locally as soon as one emerges that is good enough.
- jamesdwilson 11y ago
  Has Google sued many of their smaller competitors out of business?
  - nl 11y ago
    No
  - grahamburger 11y ago
    Isn't Google's strategy typically to just start offering the same services as their smaller competitors but for free and then let them starve? ... Kind of like what's probably happening here? Sounds like this is terrible news for Nuance, for example.
zkirill 11y ago
I came across CMU Sphnix speech recognition library (http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net) that has a BSD-style license and they just released a big update last month. It supports embedded and remote speech recognition. Could be a nice alternative for someone who may not need all of the bells and whistles and prefers to have more control rather than relying on an API which may not be free for long. Side note: if anyone is interested in helping with an embedded voice recognition project please ping me.
- hardwaresofton 11y ago
  Came in here to say this (and also include julius), but yeah cmusphinx is awesome.
  - zkirill 11y ago
    I haven't seen Julius before, thank you! How do you decide which one to use?
    - hardwaresofton 11y ago
      The last time I did interesting stuff with these libs, I used CMUSphinx -- The documentation for Julius wasn't quite good enough yet, and CMUSphinx has great documentation. Sphinx is supported by Carnegie Mellon and Julius by Kyoto University/Nagoya Institute of Technology. I think the easier choice even today might still be Sphinx. Given the excellent documentation (they touch pretty much all the basics you need to know), and the availability of pocketsphinx (C) and Sphinx4 (Java). There's also projects like this: https://github.com/syl22-00/pocketsphinx.js https://github.com/syl22-00/pocketsphinx.js
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  There is a project for Rapberry Pi to use Sphinx to roll your own Amazon Echo like device. You might want to take a look at that.
  - 11y ago
danso 11y ago
FWIW, Google followed the same strategy with Cloud Vision (iirc)..they released it in closed beta for a couple of months [0], then made it generally available with a pricing structure [1]. I've never used Nuance but I've played around with IBM Watson [2], which gives you 1000 free minutes a month, and then 2 cents a minute afterwards. Watson allows you to upload audio in 100MB chunks (or is it 10 minute chunks?, I forgot), whereas Google currently allows 2 minutes per request (edit: according to their signup page [5])...but both Watson and Google allow streaming so that's probably a non-issue for most developers. From my non-scientific observation...Watson does pretty well, such that I would consider using it for quick, first-pass transcription...it even gets a surprising number of proper nouns correctly including "ProPublica" and "Ken Auletta" -- though fudges things in other cases...its vocab does not include "Theranos", which is variously transcribed as "their in house" and "their nose" [3] It transcribed the "Trump Steaks" commercial nearly perfect...even getting the homophones in "when it comes to great steaks I just raise the stakes the sharper image is one of my favorite stores with fantastic products of all kinds that's why I'm thrilled they agree with me trump steaks are the world's greatest steaks and I mean that in every sense of the word and the sharper image is the only store where you can buy them"...though later on, it messed up "steak/stake" [4] It didn't do as great a job on this Trump "Live Free or Die" commercial, possibly because of the booming theme music...I actually did a spot check with Google's API on this and while Watson didn't get "New Hampshire" at the beginning, Google did [4]. Judging by how well YouTube manages to caption videos of all sorts, I would say that Google probably has a strong lead in overall accuracy when it comes to audio in the wild, just based on the data it processes. edit: fixed the Trump steaks transcription...Watson transcribed the first sentence correctly, but not the other "steaks" [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-offers-computer-vision-tech-2015-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-offers-computer-vision... [1] http://9to5google.com/2016/02/18/cloud-vision-api-beta-pricing/ http://9to5google.com/2016/02/18/cloud-vision-api-beta-prici... [2] https://github.com/dannguyen/watson-word-watcher https://github.com/dannguyen/watson-word-watcher [3] https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/71d49ff62e9f9eb51ac6 https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/71d49ff62e9f9eb51ac6 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYRzpWiluGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYRzpWiluGw [5] https://services.google.com/fb/forms/speech-api-alpha/ https://services.google.com/fb/forms/speech-api-alpha/
- 11y ago
jupp0r 11y ago
Anybody got the api docs yet? I wonder if I can stream from chrome via webrtc.
- zmodem 11y ago
  Can't you just use the Web Speech API for that? https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/speech-api/raw-file/tip/speechapi.html https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/speech-api/raw-file/tip/speechapi.htm...
  - jupp0r 11y ago
    I want to use cloud speech api for various reasons
flanbiscuit 11y ago
I hope this opens up some new app possibilities for the Pebble Time. I believe right now they use Nuance and it's very limited to only responding to texts.
szimek 11y ago
In the sign-up form they state that "Note that each audio request is limited to 2 minutes in length." Does anyone know what "audio request" is? Does it mean that it's limited to 2 minutes when doing real-time recognition, or just that longer periods will count as more "audio requests" and result in a higher bill? Do they provide a way to send audio via WebRTC or WebSocket from a browser?
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
So this was very, very exciting until I realized you have to be using Google Cloud Platform to sign up for the preview. Unfortunately all of my stuff is in AWS and I could move it over but I'm not going (far too much hassle to preview an API I may not end up using, ultimately). Regardless this is still very exiting. I haven't found anything that's as good as Google's voice recognition. I only hope this ends up being cheap and accessible outside of their platform.
- Matt3o12_ 11y ago
  I think you just need to register for the Google cloud and can then use the service as you want it. There is probably an advantage if you upload it directly from a Google VM (no costs for uploading from a Google service/very low latency) but it would surprise me if you have to have a Google VM. I can after all upload files to S3 and googles cloud storage even if I host the application on my hardware.
- oaktowner 11y ago
  I don't think there's any requirement that you use Google Compute Engine in order to use this API. Yes, you sign up for an account, but of course you have to sign up for an account to use it. This API is part of the platform. Similarly, you can use the Google Translate API without using Compute Engine, App Engine, etc. Note: I work for Google (but not on any of these products).
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    Ah that makes sense. It gave me the impression I had to run my services on there. I don't know if I'm the only person to screw that up or not. Thanks for clearing that up!
hardwaresofton 11y ago
In case you're not interested in having google run your speech recognition: CMU Sphinx: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ Julius: http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php
amelius 11y ago
Nice. But what I want is open-source speech recognition.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Like most machine-learning applications, the source code isn't the interesting part, the data is. Google started by training on millions of phrases from Google 411, and then they've been able to continue training anytime someone issues a voice command to an Android device. They have orders of magnitude more data than you could fit into a GitHub repository.
  - tomp 11y ago
    Couldn't you just download subtitles for old movies and train using those?
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      That's actually a pretty good idea. Lyrics for rap music might also be a good training data set. It'd bias strongly toward English, though, and particularly American English. I suspect the size of the resulting data set is also quite a bit smaller than what Google has.
    - danso 11y ago
      There aren't many old movies (in the public domain) that are subtitled and/or have good audio... However, in the U.S., we have a huge amount of government audio/video that is captioned. Here's an example of using youtube-dl to download one of President Obama's speeches and extract the closed captions (which I believe are produced by the government) into its own VTT file: https://asciinema.org/a/93ihv5er83mrpihh9i5m3s9o5 https://asciinema.org/a/93ihv5er83mrpihh9i5m3s9o5 Congress has video for all of its sessions and it is transcribed. So does the Supreme Court (though not timestamped).
    - oh_sigh 11y ago
      Doesn't even need to be old movies. Certain types of video content in the US is legally required to have subtitles(e.g. a lot of youtube content). You could programmatically download them and use that as your training set. And, since it is a transformative work, you can train your models even on copyrighted works freely.
ocdtrekkie 11y ago
"Google may choose to raise those prices over time, after it becomes the dominant player in the industry." ...Isn't that specifically what anticompetition laws were written to prevent?
- KyleBrandt 11y ago
  As a developer I might be more worried about it not becoming at least amongst the dominant players because they might just drop it. But maybe they only do that with consumer facing items?
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    Google kills off APIs often. Remember the whole Translate API fiasco? Though that was for overuse, not underuse.
    - skj 11y ago
      This is a Google Cloud Platform service, and is subject to long deprecation policies at the very least.
amelius 11y ago
Why isn't speech recognition just part of the OS? Like keyboard and mouse input.
- christianmann 11y ago
  Because speech recognition occurs on Google servers, not locally.
  - cryptoz 11y ago
    Speech recognition can occur either locally or on Google's servers. Since about 2012 [1], Android has been able to do some types of speech recognition, like dictation, on local devices. Additionally, Google Research has recently expanded on this functionality and it seems like much more of the speech recognition will be done locally [2]. [1] http://www.androidcentral.com/jelly-bean-brings-offline-voice-typing http://www.androidcentral.com/jelly-bean-brings-offline-voic... [2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/always-on-google-ai-gives-android-voice-recognition-that-works-on-or-offline/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/always-on-google-ai-gives-andro...
    - amelius 11y ago
      > always-on-google-ai-gives-android-voice-recognition-that-works-on-or-offline Since Android is open-source, would that mean that the voice recognition software (and/or trained coefficients) could, in principle, be ported to Linux?
      - Artur_Gaspar 11y ago
        "Android" as it is distributed in mobile devices has some Google proprietary components.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        > since Android is Open Source You haven't used Android since 2010, have you? In the latest versions, there is no more Open Source anything. Calendar, Contacts, Home screen, Phone app, Search, are all closed source now. (btw, all of them, including the Google app, used to be open in Gingerbread) You can't do TLS without going through Google apps (or packaging spongycastle), you can't do OpenGL ES 3.2, you can't use location anymore, nor use WiFi for your own location implementation. Since Marshmallow, you are also forced to use Google Cloud Messaging, or the device will just prevent your app from receiving notifications. To "save battery power" and "improve usability", Google monopolized all of Android.
vram22 11y ago
For anyone who wants to try these areas a bit: My trial of a Python speech library on Windows: Speech recognition with the Python "speech" module: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/03/speech-recognition-with-python-speech.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/03/speech-recognition-with-py... and also the opposite: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/578839-python-text-to-speech-with-pyttsx/?in=user-4173351 http://code.activestate.com/recipes/578839-python-text-to-sp...
zkhalique 11y ago
Has anyone tried adding OpenEars to their app, to prevent having to send things over the internet from e.g. a basement? Is it any good at recognizing basic speech?
- alexcaps 11y ago
  Pretty bad except for keyword spotting.
yeukhon 11y ago
I thought I read open source, then I realized open access. I believe in the past there was a similar API, or maybe it was based on Google Translate. But I swear at one point people wrote hackathon projects using some voice APIs.
benevol 11y ago
So if I understand the situation correctly, using this offer, we all feed the AI Google is building, thereby creating another Google monopoly situation (the AI system that gets the most training will be the strongest, thereby attracting even more users/training and becoming even stronger).
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I think they are pushing back against Amazon's Echo speech APIs, which I have experimented with. I just applied for early access.
willwill100 11y ago
Will be interesting to compare with http://www.speechmatics.com http://www.speechmatics.com
- spdustin 11y ago
  There's no hint of pricing that I could find on their page. Do you know about their pricing model?
  - willwill100 11y ago
    If you sign up you can scroll down and see the pricing on https://www.speechmatics.com/account/ https://www.speechmatics.com/account/
hans 11y ago
cool, next up is a way to tweak the speech API to recognize patterns in stocks and capex .. wasn't that what Renaissance Technologies did ? really GooG should democratize quant stuff next .. diy hedge fund algos.
chair-law 11y ago
What is the difference from a speech recognition API and [NLP libraries](https://opennlp.apache.org/ https://opennlp.apache.org/)? This information was not easily found with a few google searches, so I figured others might have the same question.
- jbkkd 11y ago
  NLP libraries process written text. This new API processes speech and extracts text from it.
vonsydov 11y ago
nuance is the new blackberry
robohamburger 11y ago
Unless I have gone crazy google has had a STT available to tinker with for awhile. It is one of the options for jasper [1]. Hopefully this means it will be easier to setup now. Would be nice if they just open sourced it though but I imagine that is at crossed purposes with their business. [1] https://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/configuration/ https://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/configuration/
alfonsodev 11y ago
I'm reading many libraries here, I wonder what's the best open and multi platform software for spech recognition to code with vim, Atom etc. I only saw a hybrid system working with dragon + Python on Windows. I would like to train/ customize my own system since I'm starting to have pain in tendons, and wrists. Do you think this Google Api can make it? Not being local looks like a limiting factor for speed, lag.
- lovelearning 11y ago
  Nothing out of the box as far as I know. You'll have to DIY. Have a look at CMUSphinx/Pocketsphinx [1]. I wrote a comment about training it for command recognition in a previous discussion[2]. It supports BNF grammar based training too [3], so I've a vague idea that it may be possible to use your programmming language's BNF to make it recognize language tokens. I haven't tried this out though. Either way, be prepared to spend some time on the training. That's the hardest part with sphinx. Also, have you seen this talk for doing it on Unix/Mac [4]? He does use natlink and dragonfly, but perhaps some concepts can be transferred to sphinx too? [1]: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174762 [3]: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/doc/sphinx4/edu/cmu/sphinx/jsgf/JSGFGrammar.html http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/doc/sphinx4/edu/cmu/sphinx/... [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
- dimatter 11y ago
  http://voicecode.io http://voicecode.io
j1vms 11y ago
I would say that Google's main goal here is in expanding their training data set, as opposed to creating a new revenue stream. If it hurts competitors (e.g. Nuance) that might only be a side-effect of that main objective, and likely they will not aim to hurt the competition intentionally. As others here have pointed out, the value now for GOOG is in building the best training data-set in the business, as opposed to just racing to find the best algorithm.
- jrv 11y ago
  Question from a machine learning noob: how would they use an unlabeled dataset for training? Would Google employees listen to it all (if the ToS would even allow that) and transscribe it, then use the result for training? Or is there another way to make it useful without being labeled?
  - TuringNYC 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsupervised_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsupervised_learning
    - jrv 11y ago
      While aware of unsupervised learning, I thought I had read somewhere that it wasn't yet a solved problem to use it for this kind of learning. But that might be wrong, and the Wikipedia article mentions some interesting examples.
      - IanCal 11y ago
        Quite a few methods of running recognition work in two stages (as a very large simplification). First, you take the huge input (because something like sound has a huge amount of data in it, similarly with images there are a lot of pixels) and learn a simpler representation of it. The second problem of mapping these nice dense features to actual things can be solved in different ways, even simple classifiers can perform well. This doesn't actually need any labelled data. I just want to learn a smaller representation. For example, if we managed to learn a mapping from bits of audio to the phonetic alphabet then our speech recognition problem becomes one of just learning the mapping from the phonetic alphabet to words which is a far nicer problem to have. Some ways of "deep learning" solve this first problem (of learning neater representations) through a step by step process of what I like to refer to as laziness. Instead of trying to learn a really, really high level representation of your input data just learn a slightly smaller one. That's one layer. Then once we've got that we try and learn a smaller/denser representation on top of that. Then again, and again, and again. How can you learn a smaller representation? Well a good way is to try and get a single layer to be able to regenerate its input. "Push" the input up, get the activations in the next layer, run the whole thing backwards and see how different your input is. You can then use this information to tweak the weights to make it slightly better the next time. Do this for millions and millions of inputs and it gets pretty good. This technique has been known about for a long time, but one of the triggers for the current big explosion of use was Hinton working out that this back and forth only really needs to be done once rather than 100 times (which was thought to be required beforehand). Hinton says it made things 100,000 times faster because it was 1% of the computation required and it took him 17 years to realise it in which time computers got 1000 times faster. Along with this, GPUs got really really fast and easier to program. I took the original Hinton work that took weeks to train and had it running in hours back in 2008 on a cheap GPU. So before ~2006 this technique would have taken years of computer time, now it's down to minutes. Of course, that's then resulted in people building significantly larger networks that take much longer to train but would have been infeasible to run before. But you still need a lot of unlabelled data. While I doubt google is doing that with this setup, they have done something before, where they setup a question answering service in the US that people could call I think for free to collect voice data. TL;DR You need labelled data. But it turns out you can learn most of what you need with unlabelled data, leaving you with a much simpler problem to solve. That's great because labelled data is massively more expensive than unlabelled data.
dominotw 11y ago
Nice! Curious how it compares to amazon's avs that went public this week. https://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi https://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi
hardik988 11y ago
Tangentially related: Does anyone remember the name of this startup/service that was on HN (I believe), that enables you to infer actions from plaintext. Eg: "Switch on the lights" becomes {"action": "switch_on", "thing" : "lights" } etc.. I'm trying really hard to remember the name but it escapes me. Speech recognition and <above service> will go very well together.
- ar7hur 11y ago
  Our service Wit.ai (YC W14) does just that. Demo: https://labs.wit.ai/demo/index.html https://labs.wit.ai/demo/index.html
  - hardik988 11y ago
    This is it! Thank you!
  - adyus 11y ago
    I've been meaning to ask someone at Wit.ai this for a while: Since your service is completely free, how do you plan on surviving? Would you open source any parts of Wit.ai should you go under? I feel these are important questions to ask before investing time & energy into using your otherwise awesome service...
    - ragebol 11y ago
      They've been acquired by Facebook, the main guys behind are now making Facebook M.
      - JustFinishedBSG 11y ago
        > They've been acquired by Facebook Ah so it will probably be discontinued
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Which languages does your service support?
jaflo 11y ago
Pretty impressive from the limited look the website (https://cloud.google.com/speech/ https://cloud.google.com/speech/) gives: the fact that Google will clean the audio of background noise for you and supports streamed input is particularly interesting. I don't know I should feel about Google taking even more data from me (and other users). How would integrating this service work legally? Would you need to alert users that Google will keep their recordings on file (probably indefinitely and without being able to delete them)?
josephcooney 11y ago
I wrote a client library for this in C# by reverse engineering what chrome did at the time (totally not legit/unsupported by google, possibly against their TOS). I have never used it for anything serious, and am glad now there is an endorsed way to do this. https://bitbucket.org/josephcooney/cloudspeech https://bitbucket.org/josephcooney/cloudspeech
mobiledev88 11y ago
Houndify launched last year and provides both speech recognition and natural language understanding. They have a free plan that never expires and transparent pricing. It can handle very complex queries that Google can't.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
melvinmt 11y ago
If you're having trouble (like me) to find your "Google Cloud Platform user account ID" to sign up for Limited Preview access, it's just the email address for your Google Cloud account. Took me only 40 minutes to figure that one out.
infocollector 11y ago
What is the best speech recognition engine, assuming one has no internet?
- sounds 11y ago
  At this time, CMU Sphinx or Julius are good choices, not great but worth a look.
braindead_in 11y ago
How well does this work with conversational speech? Any benchmarks?
omarforgotpwd 11y ago
Fuck. Yes. IBM has a similar API as well as part of their Watson APIs but I really wanted to use Google's.
Negative1 11y ago
I would be hesitant to build an entire application that relied on this API only to have it removed in a few months or years when Google realizes it sucks up time and resources and makes them no money.
- visarga 11y ago
  It seems there are a few options. Devs could use an abstraction layer and change providers with very little effort. Also, by the way things seem to be going, voice will become more and more prevalent.
jonah 11y ago
SoundHound released Houndify[1], their voice API last year which goes deeper than just speech recognition to include Speech-to-Meaning, Context and Follow-up, and Complex and Compound Queries. It will be cool to see what people will do with speech interfaces in the near future. [1] https://www.houndify.com/ https://www.houndify.com/
vincent_s 11y ago
Don't get too excited: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+shuts+down+api https://www.google.com/search?q=google+shuts+down+api
mysticmode 11y ago
I'm not sure, what will happen to Google's webspeech API in the future. Whether it will be continued as a free service.
sandra_saltlake 11y ago
Sounds like this is bad news for Nuance,
z3t4 11y ago
At least offer a self hosted version. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not comfortable sending every spoken word to Google.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Exactly this. Especially because Google's version is trained with illegally obtained user data (no, changing your ToS doesn't allow you to use previously collected data for new purposes in the EU). We, as a society, should discuss if software trained on user data should be required to be available to those who have provided that data. If for software developed by training neural networks even any copyright can exist — or if it's by definition public domain. Software trained with neural networks provides an immense advantage for existing monopolies, and makes it extremely hard for competitors. If this trend continues, startups will become impossible for software that depends on being trained with huge datasets.
timbunce 11y ago
FWIW I'd just finished a large blog post researching ways to automate podcast transcription and subsequent NLP. It includes lots of links to relevant research, tools, and services. Also includes discussion of the pros and cons of various services (Google/MS/Nuance/IBM/Vocapia etc.) and the value of vocabulary uploads and speaker profiles. http://blog.timbunce.org/2016/03/22/semi-automated-podcast-transcription-2/ http://blog.timbunce.org/2016/03/22/semi-automated-podcast-t...
- metastew 11y ago
  As a hard of hearing aspiring software developer, this would be a godsend for me if someone came up with a reliable automated transcription service. I'm often dismayed by the amount of valuable information locked in podcasts and non-transcribed videos and have to rely on goodwill of volunteers to give me transcripts. Pycon did a admirable effort to live caption their talks last year but some of those transcripts never got uploaded along with the talks which is puzzling, but I suppose it could be due to lack of timecodes. I've subbed to your blog and hopefully I can contribute whatever I can to make this work out.
zelcon 11y ago
Great, now when will Google let us use the OCR engine they crowdsourced from us over the last decade with ReCaptcha. tesseract is mediocre.
- scotth 11y ago
  https://cloud.google.com/vision/ https://cloud.google.com/vision/
E4life 11y ago
Finally, this is something that will be the main way for communication in the future.

605 points by jstoiko 11y ago

Key sentence: > The Google Cloud Speech API, which will cover over 80 languages and will work with any application in real-time streaming or batch mode, will offer full set of APIs for applications to “see, hear and translate,” Google says.

saurik 11y ago

I think this more directly competes with the IBM Watson speech API, not Nuance?

raverbashing 11y ago
Not sure how many users of IBM speech API but Nuance is big in this area (also offers offline conversion products)
jonknee 11y ago
Why? This is almost exactly what Nuance provides: https://developer.nuance.com/public/index.php?task=memberServices https://developer.nuance.com/public/index.php?task=memberSer...
- swah 11y ago
  I wanted to see if there was good speech recognition and could Google about Nuance... Now that its going to be "disrupted" I found out about it.. ironic. Try Googling "speech recognition api"...
Spooky23 11y ago
IBM's offering is using the nuance engine, with Watson using its magic to make more accurate predictions based on context.
- chetatkinsdiet 11y ago
  IBM split from Nuance a year or so ago- it's now its own engine.
bduerst 11y ago
Well NUAN took a 5% price hit after the announcement today, so maybe there's some overlap?

CaveTech 11y ago

> To attract developers, the app will be free at launch with pricing to be introduced at a later date. Doesn't this mean you could spend time developing and building on the platform without knowing if your application is economically feasible? Seems like a huge risk to take for anything other than a hobby project.

sologoub 11y ago
I was really hoping they would post at least a preview of what the pricing will be. AppEngine pricing change resulted in a nasty surprise for a lot of people and a lot of vitriol towards Google. Just one article on this from many: http://readwrite.com/2011/09/02/google-app-engine-pricing-ange/ http://readwrite.com/2011/09/02/google-app-engine-pricing-an... While the platform has moved way ahead of where it was in 2011, the memory of this is still in the back of people's mind and it would be a good move on Google's part to at least try to engender more trust by giving directional pricing.
- mianos 11y ago
  It is funny reading this in hindsight. We went straight to AWS, also for long running tcp connections, and never looked at it again. After that I have never recommended app engine.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Wasn't that five years ago? When it came out of preview (and prices were expected to change)?
  - sologoub 11y ago
    It was - 2011 is mentioned in both article and my comment. I just wish Google wouldn't bring back memories of that by not disclosing pricing of a very promising API. GAE has moved quite far ahead since then, but many people still won't consider it after the bad experience. Perceptions die hard...
    - deleted 11y ago

blennon 11y ago

This is HUGE in my opinion. Prior to this, in order to get near state-of-the-art speech recognition in your system/application you either had to have/hire expertise to build your own or pay Nuance a significant amount of money to use theirs. Nuance has always been a "big bad" company in my mind. If I recall correctly, they've sued many of their smaller competitors out of existence and only do expensive enterprise deals. I'm glad their near monopoly is coming to an end. I think Google's API will usher in a lot of new innovative applications.

ericflo 11y ago
Interesting - I saw this as a defensive response to the rising number of developers using Amazon's Alexa APIs, rather than anything related to Nuance.
- dharma1 11y ago
  It's probably been on their roadmap for a while, before Alexa came out. Re: Alexa/echo - think there is an opportunity for someone to manufacture cheap USB array mics for far field capture. Still, having this paid and cloud based puts a limit to types of things where you'd use it. I will use it in my own apps for now but will swap to a OSS speech recognition library running locally as soon as one emerges that is good enough.
jamesdwilson 11y ago
Has Google sued many of their smaller competitors out of business?
- nl 11y ago
  No
- grahamburger 11y ago
  Isn't Google's strategy typically to just start offering the same services as their smaller competitors but for free and then let them starve? ... Kind of like what's probably happening here? Sounds like this is terrible news for Nuance, for example.

zkirill 11y ago

I came across CMU Sphnix speech recognition library (http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net) that has a BSD-style license and they just released a big update last month. It supports embedded and remote speech recognition. Could be a nice alternative for someone who may not need all of the bells and whistles and prefers to have more control rather than relying on an API which may not be free for long. Side note: if anyone is interested in helping with an embedded voice recognition project please ping me.

hardwaresofton 11y ago
Came in here to say this (and also include julius), but yeah cmusphinx is awesome.
- zkirill 11y ago
  I haven't seen Julius before, thank you! How do you decide which one to use?
  - hardwaresofton 11y ago
    The last time I did interesting stuff with these libs, I used CMUSphinx -- The documentation for Julius wasn't quite good enough yet, and CMUSphinx has great documentation. Sphinx is supported by Carnegie Mellon and Julius by Kyoto University/Nagoya Institute of Technology. I think the easier choice even today might still be Sphinx. Given the excellent documentation (they touch pretty much all the basics you need to know), and the availability of pocketsphinx (C) and Sphinx4 (Java). There's also projects like this: https://github.com/syl22-00/pocketsphinx.js https://github.com/syl22-00/pocketsphinx.js
mark_l_watson 11y ago
There is a project for Rapberry Pi to use Sphinx to roll your own Amazon Echo like device. You might want to take a look at that.
- 11y ago

danso 11y ago

FWIW, Google followed the same strategy with Cloud Vision (iirc)..they released it in closed beta for a couple of months [0], then made it generally available with a pricing structure [1]. I've never used Nuance but I've played around with IBM Watson [2], which gives you 1000 free minutes a month, and then 2 cents a minute afterwards. Watson allows you to upload audio in 100MB chunks (or is it 10 minute chunks?, I forgot), whereas Google currently allows 2 minutes per request (edit: according to their signup page [5])...but both Watson and Google allow streaming so that's probably a non-issue for most developers. From my non-scientific observation...Watson does pretty well, such that I would consider using it for quick, first-pass transcription...it even gets a surprising number of proper nouns correctly including "ProPublica" and "Ken Auletta" -- though fudges things in other cases...its vocab does not include "Theranos", which is variously transcribed as "their in house" and "their nose" [3] It transcribed the "Trump Steaks" commercial nearly perfect...even getting the homophones in "when it comes to great steaks I just raise the stakes the sharper image is one of my favorite stores with fantastic products of all kinds that's why I'm thrilled they agree with me trump steaks are the world's greatest steaks and I mean that in every sense of the word and the sharper image is the only store where you can buy them"...though later on, it messed up "steak/stake" [4] It didn't do as great a job on this Trump "Live Free or Die" commercial, possibly because of the booming theme music...I actually did a spot check with Google's API on this and while Watson didn't get "New Hampshire" at the beginning, Google did [4]. Judging by how well YouTube manages to caption videos of all sorts, I would say that Google probably has a strong lead in overall accuracy when it comes to audio in the wild, just based on the data it processes. edit: fixed the Trump steaks transcription...Watson transcribed the first sentence correctly, but not the other "steaks" [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-offers-computer-vision-tech-2015-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-offers-computer-vision... [1] http://9to5google.com/2016/02/18/cloud-vision-api-beta-pricing/ http://9to5google.com/2016/02/18/cloud-vision-api-beta-prici... [2] https://github.com/dannguyen/watson-word-watcher https://github.com/dannguyen/watson-word-watcher [3] https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/71d49ff62e9f9eb51ac6 https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/71d49ff62e9f9eb51ac6 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYRzpWiluGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYRzpWiluGw [5] https://services.google.com/fb/forms/speech-api-alpha/ https://services.google.com/fb/forms/speech-api-alpha/

11y ago

jupp0r 11y ago

Anybody got the api docs yet? I wonder if I can stream from chrome via webrtc.

zmodem 11y ago
Can't you just use the Web Speech API for that? https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/speech-api/raw-file/tip/speechapi.html https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/speech-api/raw-file/tip/speechapi.htm...
- jupp0r 11y ago
  I want to use cloud speech api for various reasons

flanbiscuit 11y ago

I hope this opens up some new app possibilities for the Pebble Time. I believe right now they use Nuance and it's very limited to only responding to texts.

szimek 11y ago

In the sign-up form they state that "Note that each audio request is limited to 2 minutes in length." Does anyone know what "audio request" is? Does it mean that it's limited to 2 minutes when doing real-time recognition, or just that longer periods will count as more "audio requests" and result in a higher bill? Do they provide a way to send audio via WebRTC or WebSocket from a browser?

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

So this was very, very exciting until I realized you have to be using Google Cloud Platform to sign up for the preview. Unfortunately all of my stuff is in AWS and I could move it over but I'm not going (far too much hassle to preview an API I may not end up using, ultimately). Regardless this is still very exiting. I haven't found anything that's as good as Google's voice recognition. I only hope this ends up being cheap and accessible outside of their platform.

Matt3o12_ 11y ago
I think you just need to register for the Google cloud and can then use the service as you want it. There is probably an advantage if you upload it directly from a Google VM (no costs for uploading from a Google service/very low latency) but it would surprise me if you have to have a Google VM. I can after all upload files to S3 and googles cloud storage even if I host the application on my hardware.
oaktowner 11y ago
I don't think there's any requirement that you use Google Compute Engine in order to use this API. Yes, you sign up for an account, but of course you have to sign up for an account to use it. This API is part of the platform. Similarly, you can use the Google Translate API without using Compute Engine, App Engine, etc. Note: I work for Google (but not on any of these products).
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Ah that makes sense. It gave me the impression I had to run my services on there. I don't know if I'm the only person to screw that up or not. Thanks for clearing that up!

hardwaresofton 11y ago

In case you're not interested in having google run your speech recognition: CMU Sphinx: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ Julius: http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php

amelius 11y ago

Nice. But what I want is open-source speech recognition.

nostrademons 11y ago
Like most machine-learning applications, the source code isn't the interesting part, the data is. Google started by training on millions of phrases from Google 411, and then they've been able to continue training anytime someone issues a voice command to an Android device. They have orders of magnitude more data than you could fit into a GitHub repository.
- tomp 11y ago
  Couldn't you just download subtitles for old movies and train using those?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    That's actually a pretty good idea. Lyrics for rap music might also be a good training data set. It'd bias strongly toward English, though, and particularly American English. I suspect the size of the resulting data set is also quite a bit smaller than what Google has.
  - danso 11y ago
    There aren't many old movies (in the public domain) that are subtitled and/or have good audio... However, in the U.S., we have a huge amount of government audio/video that is captioned. Here's an example of using youtube-dl to download one of President Obama's speeches and extract the closed captions (which I believe are produced by the government) into its own VTT file: https://asciinema.org/a/93ihv5er83mrpihh9i5m3s9o5 https://asciinema.org/a/93ihv5er83mrpihh9i5m3s9o5 Congress has video for all of its sessions and it is transcribed. So does the Supreme Court (though not timestamped).
  - oh_sigh 11y ago
    Doesn't even need to be old movies. Certain types of video content in the US is legally required to have subtitles(e.g. a lot of youtube content). You could programmatically download them and use that as your training set. And, since it is a transformative work, you can train your models even on copyrighted works freely.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago

"Google may choose to raise those prices over time, after it becomes the dominant player in the industry." ...Isn't that specifically what anticompetition laws were written to prevent?

KyleBrandt 11y ago
As a developer I might be more worried about it not becoming at least amongst the dominant players because they might just drop it. But maybe they only do that with consumer facing items?
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Google kills off APIs often. Remember the whole Translate API fiasco? Though that was for overuse, not underuse.
  - skj 11y ago
    This is a Google Cloud Platform service, and is subject to long deprecation policies at the very least.

amelius 11y ago

Why isn't speech recognition just part of the OS? Like keyboard and mouse input.

christianmann 11y ago
Because speech recognition occurs on Google servers, not locally.
- cryptoz 11y ago
  Speech recognition can occur either locally or on Google's servers. Since about 2012 [1], Android has been able to do some types of speech recognition, like dictation, on local devices. Additionally, Google Research has recently expanded on this functionality and it seems like much more of the speech recognition will be done locally [2]. [1] http://www.androidcentral.com/jelly-bean-brings-offline-voice-typing http://www.androidcentral.com/jelly-bean-brings-offline-voic... [2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/always-on-google-ai-gives-android-voice-recognition-that-works-on-or-offline/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/always-on-google-ai-gives-andro...
  - amelius 11y ago
    > always-on-google-ai-gives-android-voice-recognition-that-works-on-or-offline Since Android is open-source, would that mean that the voice recognition software (and/or trained coefficients) could, in principle, be ported to Linux?
    - Artur_Gaspar 11y ago
      "Android" as it is distributed in mobile devices has some Google proprietary components.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      > since Android is Open Source You haven't used Android since 2010, have you? In the latest versions, there is no more Open Source anything. Calendar, Contacts, Home screen, Phone app, Search, are all closed source now. (btw, all of them, including the Google app, used to be open in Gingerbread) You can't do TLS without going through Google apps (or packaging spongycastle), you can't do OpenGL ES 3.2, you can't use location anymore, nor use WiFi for your own location implementation. Since Marshmallow, you are also forced to use Google Cloud Messaging, or the device will just prevent your app from receiving notifications. To "save battery power" and "improve usability", Google monopolized all of Android.

vram22 11y ago

For anyone who wants to try these areas a bit: My trial of a Python speech library on Windows: Speech recognition with the Python "speech" module: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/03/speech-recognition-with-python-speech.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/03/speech-recognition-with-py... and also the opposite: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/578839-python-text-to-speech-with-pyttsx/?in=user-4173351 http://code.activestate.com/recipes/578839-python-text-to-sp...

zkhalique 11y ago

Has anyone tried adding OpenEars to their app, to prevent having to send things over the internet from e.g. a basement? Is it any good at recognizing basic speech?

alexcaps 11y ago
Pretty bad except for keyword spotting.

yeukhon 11y ago

I thought I read open source, then I realized open access. I believe in the past there was a similar API, or maybe it was based on Google Translate. But I swear at one point people wrote hackathon projects using some voice APIs.

benevol 11y ago

So if I understand the situation correctly, using this offer, we all feed the AI Google is building, thereby creating another Google monopoly situation (the AI system that gets the most training will be the strongest, thereby attracting even more users/training and becoming even stronger).

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I think they are pushing back against Amazon's Echo speech APIs, which I have experimented with. I just applied for early access.

willwill100 11y ago

Will be interesting to compare with http://www.speechmatics.com http://www.speechmatics.com

spdustin 11y ago
There's no hint of pricing that I could find on their page. Do you know about their pricing model?
- willwill100 11y ago
  If you sign up you can scroll down and see the pricing on https://www.speechmatics.com/account/ https://www.speechmatics.com/account/

hans 11y ago

cool, next up is a way to tweak the speech API to recognize patterns in stocks and capex .. wasn't that what Renaissance Technologies did ? really GooG should democratize quant stuff next .. diy hedge fund algos.

chair-law 11y ago

What is the difference from a speech recognition API and [NLP libraries](https://opennlp.apache.org/ https://opennlp.apache.org/)? This information was not easily found with a few google searches, so I figured others might have the same question.

jbkkd 11y ago
NLP libraries process written text. This new API processes speech and extracts text from it.

vonsydov 11y ago

nuance is the new blackberry

robohamburger 11y ago

Unless I have gone crazy google has had a STT available to tinker with for awhile. It is one of the options for jasper [1]. Hopefully this means it will be easier to setup now. Would be nice if they just open sourced it though but I imagine that is at crossed purposes with their business. [1] https://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/configuration/ https://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/configuration/

alfonsodev 11y ago

I'm reading many libraries here, I wonder what's the best open and multi platform software for spech recognition to code with vim, Atom etc. I only saw a hybrid system working with dragon + Python on Windows. I would like to train/ customize my own system since I'm starting to have pain in tendons, and wrists. Do you think this Google Api can make it? Not being local looks like a limiting factor for speed, lag.

lovelearning 11y ago
Nothing out of the box as far as I know. You'll have to DIY. Have a look at CMUSphinx/Pocketsphinx [1]. I wrote a comment about training it for command recognition in a previous discussion[2]. It supports BNF grammar based training too [3], so I've a vague idea that it may be possible to use your programmming language's BNF to make it recognize language tokens. I haven't tried this out though. Either way, be prepared to spend some time on the training. That's the hardest part with sphinx. Also, have you seen this talk for doing it on Unix/Mac [4]? He does use natlink and dragonfly, but perhaps some concepts can be transferred to sphinx too? [1]: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174762 [3]: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/doc/sphinx4/edu/cmu/sphinx/jsgf/JSGFGrammar.html http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/doc/sphinx4/edu/cmu/sphinx/... [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
dimatter 11y ago
http://voicecode.io http://voicecode.io

j1vms 11y ago

I would say that Google's main goal here is in expanding their training data set, as opposed to creating a new revenue stream. If it hurts competitors (e.g. Nuance) that might only be a side-effect of that main objective, and likely they will not aim to hurt the competition intentionally. As others here have pointed out, the value now for GOOG is in building the best training data-set in the business, as opposed to just racing to find the best algorithm.

jrv 11y ago
Question from a machine learning noob: how would they use an unlabeled dataset for training? Would Google employees listen to it all (if the ToS would even allow that) and transscribe it, then use the result for training? Or is there another way to make it useful without being labeled?
- TuringNYC 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsupervised_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsupervised_learning
  - jrv 11y ago
    While aware of unsupervised learning, I thought I had read somewhere that it wasn't yet a solved problem to use it for this kind of learning. But that might be wrong, and the Wikipedia article mentions some interesting examples.
    - IanCal 11y ago
      Quite a few methods of running recognition work in two stages (as a very large simplification). First, you take the huge input (because something like sound has a huge amount of data in it, similarly with images there are a lot of pixels) and learn a simpler representation of it. The second problem of mapping these nice dense features to actual things can be solved in different ways, even simple classifiers can perform well. This doesn't actually need any labelled data. I just want to learn a smaller representation. For example, if we managed to learn a mapping from bits of audio to the phonetic alphabet then our speech recognition problem becomes one of just learning the mapping from the phonetic alphabet to words which is a far nicer problem to have. Some ways of "deep learning" solve this first problem (of learning neater representations) through a step by step process of what I like to refer to as laziness. Instead of trying to learn a really, really high level representation of your input data just learn a slightly smaller one. That's one layer. Then once we've got that we try and learn a smaller/denser representation on top of that. Then again, and again, and again. How can you learn a smaller representation? Well a good way is to try and get a single layer to be able to regenerate its input. "Push" the input up, get the activations in the next layer, run the whole thing backwards and see how different your input is. You can then use this information to tweak the weights to make it slightly better the next time. Do this for millions and millions of inputs and it gets pretty good. This technique has been known about for a long time, but one of the triggers for the current big explosion of use was Hinton working out that this back and forth only really needs to be done once rather than 100 times (which was thought to be required beforehand). Hinton says it made things 100,000 times faster because it was 1% of the computation required and it took him 17 years to realise it in which time computers got 1000 times faster. Along with this, GPUs got really really fast and easier to program. I took the original Hinton work that took weeks to train and had it running in hours back in 2008 on a cheap GPU. So before ~2006 this technique would have taken years of computer time, now it's down to minutes. Of course, that's then resulted in people building significantly larger networks that take much longer to train but would have been infeasible to run before. But you still need a lot of unlabelled data. While I doubt google is doing that with this setup, they have done something before, where they setup a question answering service in the US that people could call I think for free to collect voice data. TL;DR You need labelled data. But it turns out you can learn most of what you need with unlabelled data, leaving you with a much simpler problem to solve. That's great because labelled data is massively more expensive than unlabelled data.

dominotw 11y ago

Nice! Curious how it compares to amazon's avs that went public this week. https://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi https://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi

hardik988 11y ago

Tangentially related: Does anyone remember the name of this startup/service that was on HN (I believe), that enables you to infer actions from plaintext. Eg: "Switch on the lights" becomes {"action": "switch_on", "thing" : "lights" } etc.. I'm trying really hard to remember the name but it escapes me. Speech recognition and <above service> will go very well together.

ar7hur 11y ago
Our service Wit.ai (YC W14) does just that. Demo: https://labs.wit.ai/demo/index.html https://labs.wit.ai/demo/index.html
- hardik988 11y ago
  This is it! Thank you!
- adyus 11y ago
  I've been meaning to ask someone at Wit.ai this for a while: Since your service is completely free, how do you plan on surviving? Would you open source any parts of Wit.ai should you go under? I feel these are important questions to ask before investing time & energy into using your otherwise awesome service...
  - ragebol 11y ago
    They've been acquired by Facebook, the main guys behind are now making Facebook M.
    - JustFinishedBSG 11y ago
      > They've been acquired by Facebook Ah so it will probably be discontinued
- kuschku 11y ago
  Which languages does your service support?

jaflo 11y ago

Pretty impressive from the limited look the website (https://cloud.google.com/speech/ https://cloud.google.com/speech/) gives: the fact that Google will clean the audio of background noise for you and supports streamed input is particularly interesting. I don't know I should feel about Google taking even more data from me (and other users). How would integrating this service work legally? Would you need to alert users that Google will keep their recordings on file (probably indefinitely and without being able to delete them)?

josephcooney 11y ago

I wrote a client library for this in C# by reverse engineering what chrome did at the time (totally not legit/unsupported by google, possibly against their TOS). I have never used it for anything serious, and am glad now there is an endorsed way to do this. https://bitbucket.org/josephcooney/cloudspeech https://bitbucket.org/josephcooney/cloudspeech

mobiledev88 11y ago

Houndify launched last year and provides both speech recognition and natural language understanding. They have a free plan that never expires and transparent pricing. It can handle very complex queries that Google can't.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

melvinmt 11y ago

If you're having trouble (like me) to find your "Google Cloud Platform user account ID" to sign up for Limited Preview access, it's just the email address for your Google Cloud account. Took me only 40 minutes to figure that one out.

infocollector 11y ago

What is the best speech recognition engine, assuming one has no internet?

sounds 11y ago
At this time, CMU Sphinx or Julius are good choices, not great but worth a look.

braindead_in 11y ago

How well does this work with conversational speech? Any benchmarks?

omarforgotpwd 11y ago

Fuck. Yes. IBM has a similar API as well as part of their Watson APIs but I really wanted to use Google's.

Negative1 11y ago

I would be hesitant to build an entire application that relied on this API only to have it removed in a few months or years when Google realizes it sucks up time and resources and makes them no money.

visarga 11y ago
It seems there are a few options. Devs could use an abstraction layer and change providers with very little effort. Also, by the way things seem to be going, voice will become more and more prevalent.

jonah 11y ago

SoundHound released Houndify[1], their voice API last year which goes deeper than just speech recognition to include Speech-to-Meaning, Context and Follow-up, and Complex and Compound Queries. It will be cool to see what people will do with speech interfaces in the near future. [1] https://www.houndify.com/ https://www.houndify.com/

vincent_s 11y ago

Don't get too excited: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+shuts+down+api https://www.google.com/search?q=google+shuts+down+api

mysticmode 11y ago

I'm not sure, what will happen to Google's webspeech API in the future. Whether it will be continued as a free service.

sandra_saltlake 11y ago

Sounds like this is bad news for Nuance,

z3t4 11y ago

At least offer a self hosted version. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not comfortable sending every spoken word to Google.

kuschku 11y ago
Exactly this. Especially because Google's version is trained with illegally obtained user data (no, changing your ToS doesn't allow you to use previously collected data for new purposes in the EU). We, as a society, should discuss if software trained on user data should be required to be available to those who have provided that data. If for software developed by training neural networks even any copyright can exist — or if it's by definition public domain. Software trained with neural networks provides an immense advantage for existing monopolies, and makes it extremely hard for competitors. If this trend continues, startups will become impossible for software that depends on being trained with huge datasets.

timbunce 11y ago

FWIW I'd just finished a large blog post researching ways to automate podcast transcription and subsequent NLP. It includes lots of links to relevant research, tools, and services. Also includes discussion of the pros and cons of various services (Google/MS/Nuance/IBM/Vocapia etc.) and the value of vocabulary uploads and speaker profiles. http://blog.timbunce.org/2016/03/22/semi-automated-podcast-transcription-2/ http://blog.timbunce.org/2016/03/22/semi-automated-podcast-t...

metastew 11y ago
As a hard of hearing aspiring software developer, this would be a godsend for me if someone came up with a reliable automated transcription service. I'm often dismayed by the amount of valuable information locked in podcasts and non-transcribed videos and have to rely on goodwill of volunteers to give me transcripts. Pycon did a admirable effort to live caption their talks last year but some of those transcripts never got uploaded along with the talks which is puzzling, but I suppose it could be due to lack of timecodes. I've subbed to your blog and hopefully I can contribute whatever I can to make this work out.

zelcon 11y ago

Great, now when will Google let us use the OCR engine they crowdsourced from us over the last decade with ReCaptcha. tesseract is mediocre.

scotth 11y ago
https://cloud.google.com/vision/ https://cloud.google.com/vision/

E4life 11y ago

Finally, this is something that will be the main way for communication in the future.