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Mmm...disagree. Voice recognition has been okay for a long time, and while Siri/Cortana/OK Google are impressive displays for what they do, I don't really cons

by csydas 10y ago

Mmm...disagree. Voice recognition has been okay for a long time, and while Siri/Cortana/OK Google are impressive displays for what they do, I don't really consider it AI. It's heavy keyword indexing combined with speech recognition, and all of the Voice Assistants on phones are still pretty limited in how they will interpret requests. That is, you can't really ask for a value judgement right now from the Assistants simply because they haven't really been written to do much else besides search for specific keywords and perform an action. What I mean by this is suppose a scenario where you and friends are really hungry on a Friday and you're trying to think of what restaurant would have the shortest wait time. If you were to ask Siri, et. al. about it, unless the restaurant had a publicly accessible wait time that could be tapped for reference, the best the assistants could do is get you a list of open restaurants in yuor area. Your friends, however, probably can, with historical knowledge (times they've been there) and knowledge of current social trends (e.g., asian fusion is out, swedish fusion is in), could make a semi-educated guess as to which restaurant likely has the shortest wait. This is simply because we're recording this data subconsciously - the Assistants aren't because they've not been told to, nor do they even really have an understanding of it. If someone were to write up some parameters for the Assistants to consider it, they could start to do so (and honestly, probably should now that I think about it...). But even 15ish years ago I was goofing around with voice control for my old boat anchor iMac and was pretty impressed as to how well it handled. It wasn't as fast as what Siri, et. al. do now, but the boat anchor didn't have an entire computing center to offload the processing workload to. There really isn't anything particularly special about what is happening right now with voice assistants except for the speed at which we get the results. It is very cool to be able to do it, but I would't call it AI. At the end of the day, you're still just having your vocalizations converted into a search query and getting the same limits to results you used to get in the past. And to address the parent comment on Go "...requires an AI that displays intuition and use of heuristics", this is absolutely not in line with how the AlphaGo Researchers were describing it. Lee Sedol even started to get the hang of AlphaGo's prediction model and, if I remember correctly, it really didn't have any idea on what to do with a move that was a "wash". Lee's [1] victory came because of a move that was not evaluated correctly by AlphaGo - the move wasn't bad, in that AlphaGo couldn't capitalize on it, but it also wasn't "good" in that it didn't evaluate it as strong. AlphaGo's weakness was that it really didn't consider history at all when it came to moves, it only operated to rapidly assess the current condition of the board and try to determine the strongest path at the moment. It was a very impressive display to really hammer Lee Sedol like it did, but in interviews, Lee commented that he was starting to understand how AlphaGo made decisions, which was a problem in early games because he had no opponent to read, he had to understand an algorithm making decisions. This reddit thread has some okay breakdowns of how AlphaGo lost and how it decided moves: https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/4a7wl2/fascinating_insight_into_alpha_gos_from_match_4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/4a7wl2/fascinating_i... The entire point I'm trying to make is that while there are some very impressive Neural Network and Machine Learning tricks going on, there's also a lot going into making a really impressive curtain to hide all the computing behind. Right now, it's still the same decisions and techniques AI were doing years ago, just more efficient and faster. I wouldn't say that we have "strong AI", though I couldn't really define that if pressed. But I do know that right now Siri, AlphaGo, Watson, Cortana, OK Google and others are thinking only insomuch as a thinks. They're not really taking in and processing information as humans appear to. [1] Just a note, I'm not sure on the naming formalities for Korean, so if I've madea faux pas with referring to Lee Sedol, it's from ignorance only.

vidarh 10y ago
Speech recognition has been ok for a long time if you happened to have an accent that worked fine with it. I don't. I speak English with a relatively broad Scandinavian accent. Up until a few years ago, no voice recognition system I tested managed to recognise what I said with a high enough precision to be usable. This "suddenly" changed over the last few years. And it may very well be that the approaches changed (e.g. more heavy emphasis on statistics and large scale feeding of voice data for bad recognition to people to help improve the models; offloading to data centres), but it did change for me at least. E.g. I can now not just have it recognise valid English words, but Youtube will recognise channel names that are mixes of words and letters/numbers, and Amazon Fire will recognise every actor name or movie title I trow at it with a precision rate I would not have expected just a 3-4 years ago. It's to the point where the Google Docs speech recognition is almost usable for me too.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  The fact that voice recognition now understands your accented English is not a sign of its increased ability to understand different accents: only of its increased coverage of specific accents which now include yours. Not sure if I'm explaining that well enough. What I mean is, say Siri had a 90% accuracy in English before; that would be because it was trained with a lot of samples of English of many different accents. It wasn't trained with enough Scandinavian accents so it didn't understand them very well. Eventually more Scandinavian accented English examples became available and Siri's accuracy with Scandinavian accented English improved as a consequence. But that doesn't mean that Siri is good at understanding English with any novel accent. So its improvement is not an improvement in terms of quality, only in terms of quantity: it can do more of what it did before, but nothing new. Which is not to say that speech recognition doesn't work or that small improvements like that are useless, or anything like that, it's just to say there are still limitations and unless you're very careful it's easy to misunderstand what those are.
IshKebab 10y ago
> Voice recognition has been okay for a long time Ha what? That's just provably untrue. Just find an old Mac and try and ask it the time. A strong memory of mine is me and some friends discovering OSX's voice recognition system and trying to get it to work. It worked about 1/10th of the time, and the 'Tell me a joke' function was a particular challenge because it required you to get two recognitions to work in a row ("Tell me a joke", [knock knock], "Who's there?"). Remember those jokes techie people told about voice-activated photo copiers. That's how implausible it was that there was good voice recognition.

by csydas 10y ago

vidarh 10y ago

Speech recognition has been ok for a long time if you happened to have an accent that worked fine with it. I don't. I speak English with a relatively broad Scandinavian accent. Up until a few years ago, no voice recognition system I tested managed to recognise what I said with a high enough precision to be usable. This "suddenly" changed over the last few years. And it may very well be that the approaches changed (e.g. more heavy emphasis on statistics and large scale feeding of voice data for bad recognition to people to help improve the models; offloading to data centres), but it did change for me at least. E.g. I can now not just have it recognise valid English words, but Youtube will recognise channel names that are mixes of words and letters/numbers, and Amazon Fire will recognise every actor name or movie title I trow at it with a precision rate I would not have expected just a 3-4 years ago. It's to the point where the Google Docs speech recognition is almost usable for me too.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
The fact that voice recognition now understands your accented English is not a sign of its increased ability to understand different accents: only of its increased coverage of specific accents which now include yours. Not sure if I'm explaining that well enough. What I mean is, say Siri had a 90% accuracy in English before; that would be because it was trained with a lot of samples of English of many different accents. It wasn't trained with enough Scandinavian accents so it didn't understand them very well. Eventually more Scandinavian accented English examples became available and Siri's accuracy with Scandinavian accented English improved as a consequence. But that doesn't mean that Siri is good at understanding English with any novel accent. So its improvement is not an improvement in terms of quality, only in terms of quantity: it can do more of what it did before, but nothing new. Which is not to say that speech recognition doesn't work or that small improvements like that are useless, or anything like that, it's just to say there are still limitations and unless you're very careful it's easy to misunderstand what those are.

IshKebab 10y ago

> Voice recognition has been okay for a long time Ha what? That's just provably untrue. Just find an old Mac and try and ask it the time. A strong memory of mine is me and some friends discovering OSX's voice recognition system and trying to get it to work. It worked about 1/10th of the time, and the 'Tell me a joke' function was a particular challenge because it required you to get two recognitions to work in a row ("Tell me a joke", [knock knock], "Who's there?"). Remember those jokes techie people told about voice-activated photo copiers. That's how implausible it was that there was good voice recognition.