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I don't know by what metrics you're making these comparisons. Audio recognition and self-driving vehicles are apples and oranges. Autonomous driving is difficu

I don't know by what metrics you're making these comparisons. Audio recognition and self-driving vehicles are apples and oranges. Autonomous driving is difficult primarily because of a changing world and low tolerance for mistakes. The state space of situations you're trying to map is just large. It will take time. But it's not even close to impossible. Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language is difficult to disambiguate without context. So today the limits of our audio recognition bump up against knowing the context of words you're saying. It used to be the case that audio recognition had fundamental difficulties e.g at word boundaries but those challenges are mostly solved. Some of these challenges might not be solved without improvements in areas outside of the raw listening part of ASR. > That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it. This is your opinion. Folks at some other companies (e.g waymo) don't think this makes you safer. Human attention might not work the way you think it does.

kpil 9y ago
I think that audio recognition is an order of magnitude less complicated than fully autonomous driving. The world is fully contextless outside the road to an not-even-at-insect-level brain driving two tons of metal, and anything can happen. Voice recognition is getting just barely tolerable. If you have tried to do something important using voice recognition you'd probably go bat shit crazy after a while. If it had the potential to kill people no sane human would allow it.
- sol_remmy 9y ago
  Voice recognition also has a lot less market demand than self driving cars. Technology can be invented that is decades ahead of other fields if enough money is invested. That is why I think self-driving cars and voice recognition are not comparable problems.
  - LrnByTeach 9y ago
    Totally agree .. > Voice recognition also has a lot less market demand than self driving cars. Just to expand on your point, today's 'self driving car' technology we may equal to where 'voice recognition technology' was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, there is no incentive for industry to invest say $100 Billion in 'voice recognition technology', the benefits did not warrant such a huge investment. Where as'self driving car' technology there is potential to reap benefits that is why industry today investing $100 Billion ( all combined investments from all players ) > Technology can be invented that is decades ahead of other fields if enough money is invested. > That is why I think self-driving cars and voice recognition are not comparable problems. The huge economic value the can be created with perfected 'self driving car' is in the order of hundreds of Billions of dollars per year world wide combined . Here is an example scenario In 2025 'self driving Electric Autonomous fleet' vehicles by Uber, Googles of the world offer 'miles plan' ( like our 2005 mobile monthly plan N minutes/month ) that is like 1000 miles per month you can hail any time for a monthly price of $300/month . This is huge economic value for at least 50% of USA drivers and people will embrace it. Typical USA drivers total cost of ownership of CAR today is in the range of $400 to $600 per month ( CAR price + Repairs costs + car Insurance + gasoline cost) . This is with out counting 1.5 hours/day you have pay attention to drive, the time that can be used for other thing with autonomous fleet
- kajecounterhack 9y ago
  > The world is fully contextless outside the road to an not-even-at-insect-level brain driving two tons of metal, and anything can happen. See that's where you're wrong. An autonomous vehicle doesn't have to have a human brain. It has to have very accurate sensors and classifiers tuned with generous safety params. Like any vehicle it also needs redundancies for safety and sane default behavior (mostly "slam on the breaks"). Also, not "anything can happen." There are rules that govern the road that make this problem tractable. There are rules that govern physics that mean if you have adequate sensors + compute you can avoid hitting any objects at all, whether it's a person or otherwise. "Object x is 30 ft away with trajectory y, we're going 15mph, slam on the brakes." The difficulties mostly lie in how we can "not slam on the brakes all the time and never make progress." e.g if you enter a construction zone you better know what to do and not just sit still, otherwise you'll never get anywhere.
- fastball 9y ago
  I think Wonderful.
  - dang 9y ago
    Would you please not do this here? We're trying for at least a slightly higher quality level on HN. One thing that helps is not to assume stupidity in the other; we even added a new guideline recently to say that. More diplomatically though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
speby 9y ago
Audio recognition may be apples and oranges to self-driving vehicles. But as it relates to autonomous driving, audio recognition (and I don't mean speech but general sounds) is something nobody has been talking about (at least publicly) as a sensor input for self-driving cars. Think about how much you rely on your hearing to drive safely and well. Sure, we use sight/depth and so forth substantially but we also rely on our ears listening for different kinds of sounds that can occur from any direction to warn us of changing conditions, unsafe circumstances, and so forth. We can't even get speech recognition right and meanwhile audio (sounds in general) aren't even being seriously considered for self-driving purposes, AFAICT.
- DoubleCribble 9y ago
  Curious, isn't it? Humans rely on auditory information to enhance situational awareness so you'd think that would factor into the design of a machine that needs as much situational awareness as possible. For example, emergency response vehicles announce their arrival and direction often long before any visual contact is made. How will deaf autonomous cars recognize incoming emergency responders if the view is obstructed? Will they pull into the intersection just as a Fire Engine is running the red light? Auditory input was deemed important enough that California even made it illegal to "wear a headset covering, earplugs in, or earphones covering, resting on, or inserted in, both ears" while driving just last year. [0] I suspect other jurisdictions have/will follow(ed) suit. [0]http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=VEH&sectionNum=27400 http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
  - xapata 9y ago
    Microphones cost much h less than LIDAR.
  - pg314 9y ago
    Are deaf people allowed to drive? How do you think they handle these situations?
    - 9y ago
jstanley 9y ago
> Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language is difficult to disambiguate without context. That's not the only reason audio recognition is hard. If it were, audio recognition would be exactly as hard as interpreting written text.
- cerved 9y ago
  I get your point but to nitpick, written and spoken language are not equivalent. We don't say things like "quote", "comma" and "question mark". We use things like intonation, gestures etc.
jotjotzzz 9y ago
Agreed. I would think audio recognition is not comparable to driving, since the scope of recognizing all voices, accents, languages is vastly different than the set of rules for driving and the complexity of the road. Realistically speaking, even if Tesla or any other manufacturing company do get to that level of a "super advance Einstein-genius" self-driving car it will still be: "not even close" if it's riding alongside the highway with 18-year old Billy-bob speedster with a penchant for cutting lanes and living dangerously. Most car accidents are due to human error. If all cars on the highway are self-driving cars, with the ability to learn and communicate with each other through mesh-network or what-not, with predictive capacity -- it will be a lot better than any driving human that can only see what's in front of them. We just need to get to that level where most cars on the highway are smart self-driving capable cars and we can build on top of that. No one should be relying on self-driving cars to do everything at this point in the game because we're not there yet.
Swizec 9y ago
> language is difficult to disambiguate without context. So why don't Siri/Alexa/etc developers give them context? I would LOVE to be able to say "Alexa, play playlist on shuffle mode" or even simple "Alexa, turn on shuffle and go to next song" But no, the word "and" is completely off limits. Saying "shuffle playlist" instead of "play playlist" also doesn't work. I have to literally use 3 commands to do what I want: "Alexa, play Taylor Swift" ... "Alexa, shuffle" ... "Alexa, next song" With context, I could say "Alexa, play Taylor Swift on shuffle" Apparently Siri is gaining the ability to deal with follow up questions in iOS11. Excited to try it out.
- balls187 9y ago
  How would you differentiate: "Alexa, play Taylor Swift on shuffle" vs "Alexa, play Taylor Swift on Spotify" (real command)
  - Swizec 9y ago
    Spotify is default. She also knows how to do noun recognition. If she can tell the difference between “play” and “stop”, she can differentiate shuffle and Spotify. I’m also ok sayin “Alexa, shuffle Taylor Swift” if that’s easier for their grammar.
    - balls187 9y ago
      I think "shuffle" is the obvious choice to be used as a verb. As you mentioned, Alexa already understands shuffle (though I don't think it does for Spotify's integration).

kpil 9y ago

I think that audio recognition is an order of magnitude less complicated than fully autonomous driving. The world is fully contextless outside the road to an not-even-at-insect-level brain driving two tons of metal, and anything can happen. Voice recognition is getting just barely tolerable. If you have tried to do something important using voice recognition you'd probably go bat shit crazy after a while. If it had the potential to kill people no sane human would allow it.

sol_remmy 9y ago
Voice recognition also has a lot less market demand than self driving cars. Technology can be invented that is decades ahead of other fields if enough money is invested. That is why I think self-driving cars and voice recognition are not comparable problems.
- LrnByTeach 9y ago
  Totally agree .. > Voice recognition also has a lot less market demand than self driving cars. Just to expand on your point, today's 'self driving car' technology we may equal to where 'voice recognition technology' was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, there is no incentive for industry to invest say $100 Billion in 'voice recognition technology', the benefits did not warrant such a huge investment. Where as'self driving car' technology there is potential to reap benefits that is why industry today investing $100 Billion ( all combined investments from all players ) > Technology can be invented that is decades ahead of other fields if enough money is invested. > That is why I think self-driving cars and voice recognition are not comparable problems. The huge economic value the can be created with perfected 'self driving car' is in the order of hundreds of Billions of dollars per year world wide combined . Here is an example scenario In 2025 'self driving Electric Autonomous fleet' vehicles by Uber, Googles of the world offer 'miles plan' ( like our 2005 mobile monthly plan N minutes/month ) that is like 1000 miles per month you can hail any time for a monthly price of $300/month . This is huge economic value for at least 50% of USA drivers and people will embrace it. Typical USA drivers total cost of ownership of CAR today is in the range of $400 to $600 per month ( CAR price + Repairs costs + car Insurance + gasoline cost) . This is with out counting 1.5 hours/day you have pay attention to drive, the time that can be used for other thing with autonomous fleet
kajecounterhack 9y ago
> The world is fully contextless outside the road to an not-even-at-insect-level brain driving two tons of metal, and anything can happen. See that's where you're wrong. An autonomous vehicle doesn't have to have a human brain. It has to have very accurate sensors and classifiers tuned with generous safety params. Like any vehicle it also needs redundancies for safety and sane default behavior (mostly "slam on the breaks"). Also, not "anything can happen." There are rules that govern the road that make this problem tractable. There are rules that govern physics that mean if you have adequate sensors + compute you can avoid hitting any objects at all, whether it's a person or otherwise. "Object x is 30 ft away with trajectory y, we're going 15mph, slam on the brakes." The difficulties mostly lie in how we can "not slam on the brakes all the time and never make progress." e.g if you enter a construction zone you better know what to do and not just sit still, otherwise you'll never get anywhere.
fastball 9y ago
I think Wonderful.
- dang 9y ago
  Would you please not do this here? We're trying for at least a slightly higher quality level on HN. One thing that helps is not to assume stupidity in the other; we even added a new guideline recently to say that. More diplomatically though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

speby 9y ago

Audio recognition may be apples and oranges to self-driving vehicles. But as it relates to autonomous driving, audio recognition (and I don't mean speech but general sounds) is something nobody has been talking about (at least publicly) as a sensor input for self-driving cars. Think about how much you rely on your hearing to drive safely and well. Sure, we use sight/depth and so forth substantially but we also rely on our ears listening for different kinds of sounds that can occur from any direction to warn us of changing conditions, unsafe circumstances, and so forth. We can't even get speech recognition right and meanwhile audio (sounds in general) aren't even being seriously considered for self-driving purposes, AFAICT.

DoubleCribble 9y ago
Curious, isn't it? Humans rely on auditory information to enhance situational awareness so you'd think that would factor into the design of a machine that needs as much situational awareness as possible. For example, emergency response vehicles announce their arrival and direction often long before any visual contact is made. How will deaf autonomous cars recognize incoming emergency responders if the view is obstructed? Will they pull into the intersection just as a Fire Engine is running the red light? Auditory input was deemed important enough that California even made it illegal to "wear a headset covering, earplugs in, or earphones covering, resting on, or inserted in, both ears" while driving just last year. [0] I suspect other jurisdictions have/will follow(ed) suit. [0]http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=VEH&sectionNum=27400 http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
- xapata 9y ago
  Microphones cost much h less than LIDAR.
- pg314 9y ago
  Are deaf people allowed to drive? How do you think they handle these situations?
  - 9y ago

jstanley 9y ago

> Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language is difficult to disambiguate without context. That's not the only reason audio recognition is hard. If it were, audio recognition would be exactly as hard as interpreting written text.

cerved 9y ago
I get your point but to nitpick, written and spoken language are not equivalent. We don't say things like "quote", "comma" and "question mark". We use things like intonation, gestures etc.

jotjotzzz 9y ago

Agreed. I would think audio recognition is not comparable to driving, since the scope of recognizing all voices, accents, languages is vastly different than the set of rules for driving and the complexity of the road. Realistically speaking, even if Tesla or any other manufacturing company do get to that level of a "super advance Einstein-genius" self-driving car it will still be: "not even close" if it's riding alongside the highway with 18-year old Billy-bob speedster with a penchant for cutting lanes and living dangerously. Most car accidents are due to human error. If all cars on the highway are self-driving cars, with the ability to learn and communicate with each other through mesh-network or what-not, with predictive capacity -- it will be a lot better than any driving human that can only see what's in front of them. We just need to get to that level where most cars on the highway are smart self-driving capable cars and we can build on top of that. No one should be relying on self-driving cars to do everything at this point in the game because we're not there yet.

Swizec 9y ago

> language is difficult to disambiguate without context. So why don't Siri/Alexa/etc developers give them context? I would LOVE to be able to say "Alexa, play playlist on shuffle mode" or even simple "Alexa, turn on shuffle and go to next song" But no, the word "and" is completely off limits. Saying "shuffle playlist" instead of "play playlist" also doesn't work. I have to literally use 3 commands to do what I want: "Alexa, play Taylor Swift" ... "Alexa, shuffle" ... "Alexa, next song" With context, I could say "Alexa, play Taylor Swift on shuffle" Apparently Siri is gaining the ability to deal with follow up questions in iOS11. Excited to try it out.

balls187 9y ago
How would you differentiate: "Alexa, play Taylor Swift on shuffle" vs "Alexa, play Taylor Swift on Spotify" (real command)
- Swizec 9y ago
  Spotify is default. She also knows how to do noun recognition. If she can tell the difference between “play” and “stop”, she can differentiate shuffle and Spotify. I’m also ok sayin “Alexa, shuffle Taylor Swift” if that’s easier for their grammar.
  - balls187 9y ago
    I think "shuffle" is the obvious choice to be used as a verb. As you mentioned, Alexa already understands shuffle (though I don't think it does for Spotify's integration).