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Is that just a question of expending the resources on that domain, though? Untold man-hours and compute cycles have been spent on making English speech-to-text

Is that just a question of expending the resources on that domain, though? Untold man-hours and compute cycles have been spent on making English speech-to-text mostly work. I would be surprised if even a fraction of that energy has been devoted to other languages.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
Let's say we have a set of techniques that can do convincing text-to-speech in limited domains, but those techniques are too cumbersome to solve it in the general sense, at least with current equipment and data. Then there's the ability of humans to process speech, which works in a much broader range of situations and therefore suggests that there is a better way to do that sort of thing than the techniques we have right now. Does this help reconcile the two seemingly contradictory comments, above?
realusername 8y ago
The issue with French and why it works so badly is the assumptions people made when designing the speech-to-text by starting from English. The core issue is that spoken French and written French are two completely and widely separate languages, with a much much greater difference than English. So the current approach to try to use books and mapping words to them isn't just working well. What I mean is the current approach is pretty limited.
- dpark 8y ago
  > The core issue is that spoken French and written French are two completely and widely separate languages In what way?
  - realusername 8y ago
    Written french is largely codified by the french academy which is very conservative (so the written language did not evolve much in the past 100 years) whereas the spoken language evolved independently. It's a bit like slangs in English if you want but to a whole new level, the two parts of the language don't have much in common nowadays. Tenses, pronouns, grammar, sentence construction and words are different.
    - dpark 8y ago
      It’s hard for me to believe the they have diverged that much. I’d expect that the one would drastically influence the other. But then I don’t know French.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

Let's say we have a set of techniques that can do convincing text-to-speech in limited domains, but those techniques are too cumbersome to solve it in the general sense, at least with current equipment and data. Then there's the ability of humans to process speech, which works in a much broader range of situations and therefore suggests that there is a better way to do that sort of thing than the techniques we have right now. Does this help reconcile the two seemingly contradictory comments, above?

realusername 8y ago

The issue with French and why it works so badly is the assumptions people made when designing the speech-to-text by starting from English. The core issue is that spoken French and written French are two completely and widely separate languages, with a much much greater difference than English. So the current approach to try to use books and mapping words to them isn't just working well. What I mean is the current approach is pretty limited.

dpark 8y ago
> The core issue is that spoken French and written French are two completely and widely separate languages In what way?
- realusername 8y ago
  Written french is largely codified by the french academy which is very conservative (so the written language did not evolve much in the past 100 years) whereas the spoken language evolved independently. It's a bit like slangs in English if you want but to a whole new level, the two parts of the language don't have much in common nowadays. Tenses, pronouns, grammar, sentence construction and words are different.
  - dpark 8y ago
    It’s hard for me to believe the they have diverged that much. I’d expect that the one would drastically influence the other. But then I don’t know French.