5 ms·

It's interesting that while we aren't at 10 GHz quite yet, the functionality that was mentioned in the article [1][2] is here and works even on budget smartphon

by Strom 10y ago

It's interesting that while we aren't at 10 GHz quite yet, the functionality that was mentioned in the article [1][2] is here and works even on budget smartphones. -- [1] Imagine being able to speak normally with your computer as you would a secretary sitting next to you and have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech. [2] Imagine logging onto your computer not via a user name and a password but by sitting in front of your display and having it scan your face to figure out if you are allowed access to the computer.

flukus 10y ago
The functionality existed on desktop computers at the time, so it's not really a prediction.
- Strom 10y ago
  I certainly don't remember anything of usable quality being available to end-users. My Windows 98 machine could barely play 360p videos and didn't even have a camera. The voice recognition that I do remember trying was of very low accuracy. Do you remember any specifics of where & how exactly these features were available?
  - flukus 10y ago
    Not sure about the software but webcams were available from the early 90's. I think there was an old amiga magazine that came with some facial recognition demo ware. For voice there were things like dragon that could do reasonably accurate full voice dictation. IME it was more accurate the google voice is today because it was trained. Moving these to the cloud is more about controlling data than it is about lack of local computing power.
  - WillPostForFood 10y ago
    We had people in the office in the late 90s with repetitive stress issues who were using Dragon NaturallySpeaking pretty effectively.
    - the-dude 10y ago
      But where have the repetitive stress issues gone?
      - VLM 10y ago
        Ageism, if your wrists are toast by age 40, but no one gets hired over 30, or whatever the exact numbers are, it doesn't matter much as long as A is higher than B.
  - et-al 10y ago
    I remember around 2007/2008 Sony VAIOs had facial recognition login. I freaked out on how decent it was, then thought about the DMV and Facebook being able to use this and really freaked out.
  - rhplus 10y ago
    State of the art for dictation was probably Dragon Dictate / Naturally Speaking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking Windows had an API for basic command recognition, in late 90's giving the ability to navigate through telephony menus, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API#SAPI_1-4_API_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API#SAPI_1-4_...
    - tgb 10y ago
      Oh yeah, very practical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec
      - flukus 10y ago
        That's a lot better than the results I get from Google voice today. Writing code isn't what it's optimised for though.
      - hendersoon 10y ago
        It was completely usable at the time, but did require a relatively beefy PC. Doctors and attorneys very commonly used it to dictate letters.
        flukus 10y ago
        And for context "beefy PC" here means less CPU power and RAM than the cheapest smart phone today.
  - KVFinn 10y ago
    Dragon Dictate worked pretty well in 2001 from what I recall, if you were willing to train it.
DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
Example 1, if we're referring to the likes of Siri and Alexa isn't thanks to improvements in personal computer technology - said platforms send your speech recording off to a massive datacenter for processing, no need for 10Ghz processors there. Example 2 requires the use of depth-sensing and heat-sensitive cameras to avoid trivial "show a photo of an authorized user" attacks - that's not really CPU-dependent either.
- tuxracer 10y ago
  Android has had face unlock built in for some time. A naive way it mitigates the "unlock with photo" vulnerability is an option requiring you to blink. Not as robust as 3d, heat sensitive cameras but it's at least not a trivial as showing a photo to beat it. The impressive amount of processing power available on many smartphones today certainly contributes to this being a practical unlock method.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    You're right, you also need to sweep across the eyes with a pencil to defeat that. In case you're interested in more detail, Google starbug's excellent talk "ich sehe, also bin ich... du" (there's an English translation).
  - ralfd 10y ago
    Is face unlock fooled by video of a person blinking?
- faitswulff 10y ago
  RE example 1, there is offline voice recognition, though.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Not sure if Siri and Alexa (and Google Now) send every recording to a data center - the .NET speech recognition libraries ship with Windows, so all audio data stays local to your PC, afaik. I'd expect Cortana leverages these libraries as well, instead of sending all data to a remote server. You can build basic functionality into a speech bot in Powershell ("PowerShiri, what time is it?" "PowerShiri, what is the weather?") as a weekend project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663029
new299 10y ago
Is this really the experience of voice recognition people have? I can't get Siri to reliably create appointments... takes about 3 tries for the voice recognition to work correctly.
- Strom 10y ago
  Siri's voice recognition definitely isn't state of the art, although it got a lot better for me with iOS 10. However even the Google app on iOS has leaps & bounds better recognition in my experience.
- Kiro 10y ago
  Definitely. Google Home picks up everything perfectly on the level that I'm really surprised the few times it actually fails.
  - dx034 10y ago
    With Amazo nEcho this was exactly my experience for the first week. Since then, I've learned where it fails and are becoming more annoyed by it. The clear difference between current voice recognition and a real person is that they don't adapt to the way you talk. They don't learn if they misunderstood you once. As an example, if I ask Alexa to play a certain kind of music and she plays the wrong one, I'll have to specify it further to get the correct music. Next time I'd expect her to get the clue, but she'll make the same mistake again. Even though the most annoying thing is that chain commands don't really work with any assistant. I'd expect to give 4-5 commands at once and get them executed. Activating it for each command is very annoying.
  - philliphaydon 10y ago
    I have an iPhone now and don't bother with Siri because it's wrong more often than right. Between Apple, Google, and Microsoft. To me only Cortana is worth using. For example. If I say "text prentice" neither Siri or Google Now can figure it out. But 100% of the time Cortana picks it up. I do miss my windows phone :(
- piyush_soni 10y ago
elmigranto 10y ago
> have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech Well, about those accurately and _your_ computer parts… :)
n00b101 10y ago
Also interesting is that modern speech and image recognition runs on NVIDIA GPUs using neural networks, with the Intel CPU relegated to playing a supporting actor role. GPUs also face the same Dennard scaling problem, and don't run anywhere close to 10GHz, but their microarchitecture makes better use of the available silicon/power for parallel numerical computing problems.

by Strom 10y ago

flukus 10y ago

The functionality existed on desktop computers at the time, so it's not really a prediction.

Strom 10y ago
I certainly don't remember anything of usable quality being available to end-users. My Windows 98 machine could barely play 360p videos and didn't even have a camera. The voice recognition that I do remember trying was of very low accuracy. Do you remember any specifics of where & how exactly these features were available?
- flukus 10y ago
  Not sure about the software but webcams were available from the early 90's. I think there was an old amiga magazine that came with some facial recognition demo ware. For voice there were things like dragon that could do reasonably accurate full voice dictation. IME it was more accurate the google voice is today because it was trained. Moving these to the cloud is more about controlling data than it is about lack of local computing power.
- WillPostForFood 10y ago
  We had people in the office in the late 90s with repetitive stress issues who were using Dragon NaturallySpeaking pretty effectively.
  - the-dude 10y ago
    But where have the repetitive stress issues gone?
    - VLM 10y ago
      Ageism, if your wrists are toast by age 40, but no one gets hired over 30, or whatever the exact numbers are, it doesn't matter much as long as A is higher than B.
- et-al 10y ago
  I remember around 2007/2008 Sony VAIOs had facial recognition login. I freaked out on how decent it was, then thought about the DMV and Facebook being able to use this and really freaked out.
- rhplus 10y ago
  State of the art for dictation was probably Dragon Dictate / Naturally Speaking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking Windows had an API for basic command recognition, in late 90's giving the ability to navigate through telephony menus, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API#SAPI_1-4_API_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API#SAPI_1-4_...
  - tgb 10y ago
    Oh yeah, very practical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec
    - flukus 10y ago
      That's a lot better than the results I get from Google voice today. Writing code isn't what it's optimised for though.
    - hendersoon 10y ago
      It was completely usable at the time, but did require a relatively beefy PC. Doctors and attorneys very commonly used it to dictate letters.
      - flukus 10y ago
        And for context "beefy PC" here means less CPU power and RAM than the cheapest smart phone today.
- KVFinn 10y ago
  Dragon Dictate worked pretty well in 2001 from what I recall, if you were willing to train it.

DaiPlusPlus 10y ago

Example 1, if we're referring to the likes of Siri and Alexa isn't thanks to improvements in personal computer technology - said platforms send your speech recording off to a massive datacenter for processing, no need for 10Ghz processors there. Example 2 requires the use of depth-sensing and heat-sensitive cameras to avoid trivial "show a photo of an authorized user" attacks - that's not really CPU-dependent either.

tuxracer 10y ago
Android has had face unlock built in for some time. A naive way it mitigates the "unlock with photo" vulnerability is an option requiring you to blink. Not as robust as 3d, heat sensitive cameras but it's at least not a trivial as showing a photo to beat it. The impressive amount of processing power available on many smartphones today certainly contributes to this being a practical unlock method.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  You're right, you also need to sweep across the eyes with a pencil to defeat that. In case you're interested in more detail, Google starbug's excellent talk "ich sehe, also bin ich... du" (there's an English translation).
- ralfd 10y ago
  Is face unlock fooled by video of a person blinking?
faitswulff 10y ago
RE example 1, there is offline voice recognition, though.
stephengillie 10y ago
Not sure if Siri and Alexa (and Google Now) send every recording to a data center - the .NET speech recognition libraries ship with Windows, so all audio data stays local to your PC, afaik. I'd expect Cortana leverages these libraries as well, instead of sending all data to a remote server. You can build basic functionality into a speech bot in Powershell ("PowerShiri, what time is it?" "PowerShiri, what is the weather?") as a weekend project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663029

new299 10y ago

Is this really the experience of voice recognition people have? I can't get Siri to reliably create appointments... takes about 3 tries for the voice recognition to work correctly.

Strom 10y ago
Siri's voice recognition definitely isn't state of the art, although it got a lot better for me with iOS 10. However even the Google app on iOS has leaps & bounds better recognition in my experience.
Kiro 10y ago
Definitely. Google Home picks up everything perfectly on the level that I'm really surprised the few times it actually fails.
- dx034 10y ago
  With Amazo nEcho this was exactly my experience for the first week. Since then, I've learned where it fails and are becoming more annoyed by it. The clear difference between current voice recognition and a real person is that they don't adapt to the way you talk. They don't learn if they misunderstood you once. As an example, if I ask Alexa to play a certain kind of music and she plays the wrong one, I'll have to specify it further to get the correct music. Next time I'd expect her to get the clue, but she'll make the same mistake again. Even though the most annoying thing is that chain commands don't really work with any assistant. I'd expect to give 4-5 commands at once and get them executed. Activating it for each command is very annoying.
- philliphaydon 10y ago
  I have an iPhone now and don't bother with Siri because it's wrong more often than right. Between Apple, Google, and Microsoft. To me only Cortana is worth using. For example. If I say "text prentice" neither Siri or Google Now can figure it out. But 100% of the time Cortana picks it up. I do miss my windows phone :(
piyush_soni 10y ago

elmigranto 10y ago

> have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech Well, about those accurately and _your_ computer parts… :)

n00b101 10y ago

Also interesting is that modern speech and image recognition runs on NVIDIA GPUs using neural networks, with the Intel CPU relegated to playing a supporting actor role. GPUs also face the same Dennard scaling problem, and don't run anywhere close to 10GHz, but their microarchitecture makes better use of the available silicon/power for parallel numerical computing problems.