5 ms·

Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

86 points by stanzheng 8y ago

andrewstuart 8y ago
Google can't even get its demo text to speech to work - it's been offline for weeks https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/
- wpietri 8y ago
  Their user focus is shockingly poor. I followed the link from the blog post that said "check out the demo on our product website". Then there's a big button that says "TRY IT FREE". Good, I say. That leads me through a signup process that involves credit cards and whatnot, and then dumps me out on what I guess is the equivalent of the AWS console, not some nice audio test page. So then I root around in the console, finally find the text to speech stuff, and screw around with various interfaces. None of them seems to be the right thing. Eventually I decide I must have missed something, go back to the product website, and scroll down further to find the "convert your speech to text right now". Great, say I. The blog post explicitly talks about video. I want to see if it can transcribe a talk I did, so I tried uploading a file; nothing appears to happen on Firefox. I try a couple more times. I sigh heavily and switch to Chrome. It does appear to work on Chrome, but it's entirely infuriating. I tried uploading a video file, which was over 50MB, so it refused. I then figured out how to extract the audio alone and uploaded that, at which point it complained it was over a minute. Then I find another incantation to chop my audio to a minute (which they just should have done for me, and which anyway should be explained in the interface). Finally, I upload 60 seconds of audio. And nothing fucking happens. After all that, the thing just doesn't doesn't work. No error messages, no anything. This is my first impression of the Google Cloud Platform, and all I hear is the squeaking of clown shoes. I'm sure the rest of it can't be this bad, but if they can't make a simple demo work, I'm unlikely to find out.
  - anameaname 8y ago
    This is what you get when you don't have a top-down management style. Teams are given too much freedom, leading to inconsistency. No one has the whole vision of how a product should work. Even if they did have that, they likely don't have the authority to make it happen.
    - wpietri 8y ago
      I doubt it. If anything, I think this is likely to be a symptom of too much top-down power. It smacks of high-level mandates and checklist features. There's some boss with a made-up, can't-miss release date who doesn't really look very closely at what gets produced, just as long as he can tell his boss that things shipped on time and to spec. I've worked with some great, highly autonomous teams. What makes them work well is a strong emotional and informational connection to users. They do lots of user testing, so they can get inside a user's head. They try things out themselves, using what they've learned from talking to those users. And they keep an eye on production usage, because they really care that what they make delivers value and gets used.
  - mkempe 8y ago
    I've tried their transcription API. The quality is awful, to the point where the output of words is completely different depending on chopping off a few initial or trailing seconds of the audio at a time. Thanks for "the squeaking of clown shoes". I'll have to remember that.
    - mkempe 8y ago
      Let me rephrase that for the haters: the quality of that transcription API was godawful. I took a ten minute audio segment from a two-person interview, and chopped it up in shorter segments to fit under the 60-second limit, with varying overlap durations to make sure that full sentences would be included on either side of the snip. I ran a battery of tests with segments of 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and overlaps of 3s, 5s, and 10s. The output was essentially useless garbage, with wild differences in the transcription depending on segment lengths and overlap durations. In one configuration one sentence may be perfectly transcribed and the next was word salad, in another both sentences were useless salads, in another half of each sentence was right but words were missing, etc. No configuration ever yielded a useful output. Time and money spent: several hours, $$$.
tudorconstantin 8y ago
I wonder how much it will take until countries will require Telecom companies to transcribe and store all the phone calls for a "limited time period" of, let's say, 6 months, for "our security". And then run algorithms on these texts to classify the conversations into "potentially crime related discussions" classes.
- supertrope 8y ago
  It wouldn’t surprise me if this is de-classified technology or the top secret parents have expired. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/04/teleph...
- caseysoftware 8y ago
  If they force the carriers to do it, then they likely have to deal with subpoenas or other documentation. If the government (of any country) does it themselves, that's way easier - https://infogalactic.com/info/ECHELON https://infogalactic.com/info/ECHELON
- aviv 8y ago
  Companies are already asking for this themselves. There's huge demand for all-calls voice transcription, and companies are willing to pay for it.
  - gregsadetsky 8y ago
    Do you know of specific demand? Would you mind contacting me (gs @ my HN username .com) to chat about this? Thanks!
- ClassyJacket 8y ago
  The hard part isn't even me or you using end-to-end encrypted services, the hard part is getting the majority of people to care enough that they do.
monkeydust 8y ago
Going through a course udemy at the moment and thought it would be great if the whole thing was transcribed for easy referencing later.
gok 8y ago
> Cloud Speech-to-Text (formerly known as Cloud Speech API) Interesting name change. It’s certainly more precise, but was “Speech API” really confusing people?
- rahimnathwani 8y ago
  Speech API sounds like it generates speech, i.e. TTS
xbmcuser 8y ago
How long before we can get a kodi plugin that transcribes the text and translates to the subtitle language you have chosen. I would really be interested in this for Japanese, Korean and Chinese shows that I have to wait sometime months or years before fansubs are available. Though because of Netflix english subs are being available a lot quicker than previously for many of these shows.
- make3 8y ago
  .. there's nothing stopping you from writing it, it's just a few calls to their Google cloud api. it's not an afternoon's work in the scripting language of your choice. the real issue is that I suspect translation might be a bit off at times
6841iam 8y ago
the number of voice based startups that have built business logic on top of this fundamental api is staggering. some names: voicera (automated meeting minutes), voiceops (call center call analysis), chorus.ai (phone call analytics) the focus on improving call center performance is where the money is. plenty more vendors will enter this market.
Animats 8y ago
How long before Google Voice listens to your phone calls for ad tracking purposes?
- lozf 8y ago
  The tracking part will be one step away - i.e, it'll "read the transcript" including all the missed subtle inflections and other subtleties; contextual clues from pitch or tone e.g. sarcasm, which will lead to some hilarious mis-targeting, until LEO (or other Authorities) use a similar system and something dreadful happens.
diminish 8y ago
I'm still waiting for 10x-100x drop in their prices - I believe that's going to enable a lot of new startups.
gaius 8y ago
So what happens to these transcripts? Google keeps a copy right? What do they do with it after?
adorable 8y ago
Does anybody know what the existing open-source / free alternatives are? (that you could run on your own servers)?
- woodson 8y ago
  The Kaldi toolkit is state of the art, but you have to know quite a bit about speech and natural language processing to create a comparable service that works well (or invest the time to learn it). Definitely not plug and play, though. Then there are implementations of Baidu’s DeepSpeech (PaddlePaddle: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech, or Mozilla’s version).
infocollector 8y ago
What is the best Speech-To-Text program currently that is free and does not require an internet connection?
walterbell 8y ago
For offline use, a (paid) alternative is Nuance’s Dragon, https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html
- flarg 8y ago
  I use this on a daily basis and it's pretty good but can't cope with fast speech or poor sound quality. For the price I don't expect more but it's not amazing.
UperSpaceGuru 8y ago
Met Dan at an AI conference & having worked with the API, I think it's really cool that your average dev has access to this level of Transcription that's a non-trivial problem (been working on Speech Recognition since early '00s). I agree with some of the comments regarding Google being a big co & having big co issues. But at the core of it, the team, the offering & attention to what matters is solid. It's certainly going to open up a whole new realm of possibilities.

86 points by stanzheng 8y ago

Google can't even get its demo text to speech to work - it's been offline for weeks https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/

wpietri 8y ago
Their user focus is shockingly poor. I followed the link from the blog post that said "check out the demo on our product website". Then there's a big button that says "TRY IT FREE". Good, I say. That leads me through a signup process that involves credit cards and whatnot, and then dumps me out on what I guess is the equivalent of the AWS console, not some nice audio test page. So then I root around in the console, finally find the text to speech stuff, and screw around with various interfaces. None of them seems to be the right thing. Eventually I decide I must have missed something, go back to the product website, and scroll down further to find the "convert your speech to text right now". Great, say I. The blog post explicitly talks about video. I want to see if it can transcribe a talk I did, so I tried uploading a file; nothing appears to happen on Firefox. I try a couple more times. I sigh heavily and switch to Chrome. It does appear to work on Chrome, but it's entirely infuriating. I tried uploading a video file, which was over 50MB, so it refused. I then figured out how to extract the audio alone and uploaded that, at which point it complained it was over a minute. Then I find another incantation to chop my audio to a minute (which they just should have done for me, and which anyway should be explained in the interface). Finally, I upload 60 seconds of audio. And nothing fucking happens. After all that, the thing just doesn't doesn't work. No error messages, no anything. This is my first impression of the Google Cloud Platform, and all I hear is the squeaking of clown shoes. I'm sure the rest of it can't be this bad, but if they can't make a simple demo work, I'm unlikely to find out.
- anameaname 8y ago
  This is what you get when you don't have a top-down management style. Teams are given too much freedom, leading to inconsistency. No one has the whole vision of how a product should work. Even if they did have that, they likely don't have the authority to make it happen.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    I doubt it. If anything, I think this is likely to be a symptom of too much top-down power. It smacks of high-level mandates and checklist features. There's some boss with a made-up, can't-miss release date who doesn't really look very closely at what gets produced, just as long as he can tell his boss that things shipped on time and to spec. I've worked with some great, highly autonomous teams. What makes them work well is a strong emotional and informational connection to users. They do lots of user testing, so they can get inside a user's head. They try things out themselves, using what they've learned from talking to those users. And they keep an eye on production usage, because they really care that what they make delivers value and gets used.
- mkempe 8y ago
  I've tried their transcription API. The quality is awful, to the point where the output of words is completely different depending on chopping off a few initial or trailing seconds of the audio at a time. Thanks for "the squeaking of clown shoes". I'll have to remember that.
  - mkempe 8y ago
    Let me rephrase that for the haters: the quality of that transcription API was godawful. I took a ten minute audio segment from a two-person interview, and chopped it up in shorter segments to fit under the 60-second limit, with varying overlap durations to make sure that full sentences would be included on either side of the snip. I ran a battery of tests with segments of 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and overlaps of 3s, 5s, and 10s. The output was essentially useless garbage, with wild differences in the transcription depending on segment lengths and overlap durations. In one configuration one sentence may be perfectly transcribed and the next was word salad, in another both sentences were useless salads, in another half of each sentence was right but words were missing, etc. No configuration ever yielded a useful output. Time and money spent: several hours, $$$.

tudorconstantin 8y ago

I wonder how much it will take until countries will require Telecom companies to transcribe and store all the phone calls for a "limited time period" of, let's say, 6 months, for "our security". And then run algorithms on these texts to classify the conversations into "potentially crime related discussions" classes.

supertrope 8y ago
It wouldn’t surprise me if this is de-classified technology or the top secret parents have expired. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/04/teleph...
caseysoftware 8y ago
If they force the carriers to do it, then they likely have to deal with subpoenas or other documentation. If the government (of any country) does it themselves, that's way easier - https://infogalactic.com/info/ECHELON https://infogalactic.com/info/ECHELON
aviv 8y ago
Companies are already asking for this themselves. There's huge demand for all-calls voice transcription, and companies are willing to pay for it.
- gregsadetsky 8y ago
  Do you know of specific demand? Would you mind contacting me (gs @ my HN username .com) to chat about this? Thanks!
ClassyJacket 8y ago
The hard part isn't even me or you using end-to-end encrypted services, the hard part is getting the majority of people to care enough that they do.

monkeydust 8y ago

Going through a course udemy at the moment and thought it would be great if the whole thing was transcribed for easy referencing later.

gok 8y ago

> Cloud Speech-to-Text (formerly known as Cloud Speech API) Interesting name change. It’s certainly more precise, but was “Speech API” really confusing people?

rahimnathwani 8y ago
Speech API sounds like it generates speech, i.e. TTS

xbmcuser 8y ago

How long before we can get a kodi plugin that transcribes the text and translates to the subtitle language you have chosen. I would really be interested in this for Japanese, Korean and Chinese shows that I have to wait sometime months or years before fansubs are available. Though because of Netflix english subs are being available a lot quicker than previously for many of these shows.

make3 8y ago
.. there's nothing stopping you from writing it, it's just a few calls to their Google cloud api. it's not an afternoon's work in the scripting language of your choice. the real issue is that I suspect translation might be a bit off at times

6841iam 8y ago

the number of voice based startups that have built business logic on top of this fundamental api is staggering. some names: voicera (automated meeting minutes), voiceops (call center call analysis), chorus.ai (phone call analytics) the focus on improving call center performance is where the money is. plenty more vendors will enter this market.

Animats 8y ago

How long before Google Voice listens to your phone calls for ad tracking purposes?

lozf 8y ago
The tracking part will be one step away - i.e, it'll "read the transcript" including all the missed subtle inflections and other subtleties; contextual clues from pitch or tone e.g. sarcasm, which will lead to some hilarious mis-targeting, until LEO (or other Authorities) use a similar system and something dreadful happens.

diminish 8y ago

I'm still waiting for 10x-100x drop in their prices - I believe that's going to enable a lot of new startups.

gaius 8y ago

So what happens to these transcripts? Google keeps a copy right? What do they do with it after?

adorable 8y ago

Does anybody know what the existing open-source / free alternatives are? (that you could run on your own servers)?

woodson 8y ago
The Kaldi toolkit is state of the art, but you have to know quite a bit about speech and natural language processing to create a comparable service that works well (or invest the time to learn it). Definitely not plug and play, though. Then there are implementations of Baidu’s DeepSpeech (PaddlePaddle: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech, or Mozilla’s version).

infocollector 8y ago

What is the best Speech-To-Text program currently that is free and does not require an internet connection?

walterbell 8y ago

For offline use, a (paid) alternative is Nuance’s Dragon, https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html

flarg 8y ago
I use this on a daily basis and it's pretty good but can't cope with fast speech or poor sound quality. For the price I don't expect more but it's not amazing.

UperSpaceGuru 8y ago

Met Dan at an AI conference & having worked with the API, I think it's really cool that your average dev has access to this level of Transcription that's a non-trivial problem (been working on Speech Recognition since early '00s). I agree with some of the comments regarding Google being a big co & having big co issues. But at the core of it, the team, the offering & attention to what matters is solid. It's certainly going to open up a whole new realm of possibilities.