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Children's voices are a surprisingly tough problem in speech recognition. Mostly because there isn't much labeled data with children's voices- ASR follows the t
by skoocda 10y ago
Children's voices are a surprisingly tough problem in speech recognition. Mostly because there isn't much labeled data with children's voices- ASR follows the trend seen in other deep learning fields of working best for North American adult males.
When children talk, it's a significantly different pitch than any adult (male or female) and their enunciation is usually poor. Being robust to that range requires a ton of data and a very deep neural network. It will definitely be solved earlier on the cloud: don't expect super-adaptable speech recognition to be available on your phone any time soon.
- gok 10y agoThere's also a legal/moral question of whether it's ok to capture the speech of children to build better models for this kind of thing.
- grzm 10y agoInteresting question, but I'm not sure why it would be any different from monitoring the adults who bought and installed the system. It would be part of the terms of service, I would think. The adults accept this on their behalf. Would there be another interpretation?
- gok 10y agoIn the US, COPPA makes it very difficult to legally collect information from children under 13 for commercial purposes.
- grzm 10y agoInteresting. Do you know of specifics about COPPA (or COPA) that would apply to this situation?
- gok 10y agoCOPA is a piece of dead legislation. COPPA is in effect since 2000. The big issue recently is that in 2011 the FTC made the rules much stricter about data collection [1]. Parental consent now requires identification checks which are hard. Data retention is also a bit of a mess; guidelines now imply that the data should be deleted as soon as possible. Morally, I do feel like there's a bit of a question here. Is it ok to have a 6 year old donate her voice to improve your speech recognition product even though she wouldn't directly see a benefit from it? [1] http://www.natlawreview.com/article/ftc-will-propose-broader-children-s-online-privacy-safeguards http://www.natlawreview.com/article/ftc-will-propose-broader...
- icebraining 10y agoIs it ok to have a 6 year old donate her voice to improve your speech recognition product even though she wouldn't directly see a benefit from it? Why couldn't you provide some direct benefit? IIRC that's was the point of Google Voice: provide a free product in exchange of getting people to help them improve voice recognition.