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Mozilla’s DeepSpeech is available as an offline pre-trained system for English. The quality is far below Google’s speech API as the model is somewhat out of da

Mozilla’s DeepSpeech is available as an offline pre-trained system for English. The quality is far below Google’s speech API as the model is somewhat out of date and more importantly the training data set is much smaller and less general. The best pretrained speech to text model I’ve seen is from Baidu’s DeepSpeech 2 repository. They provide pretrained models for English and Chinese based on their internal data. The quality is astonishingly good! Edit: both of these models can be comfortably run in real-time on a desktop. At Arm I recently worked on a project to run <5% word error rate models in real-time on a mobile phone.

danShumway 8y ago
I'm happy to be wrong about that; I was under the impression that DeepSpeech was available as a data set for training, but not as a trained system in and of itself. My impression is that a lot of the hardware costs from modern AI comes from training and updating the model. So (speaking as a non-expert) it doesn't seem like there's any technological problem with running a model locally on a private network -- you just need access to the model and you need someone else to generate it. And that's exactly what Google isn't providing. It's like they found a way to turn modern AI into even more of a black box. At the point where I'm OK consuming someone else's model and not being able to control how it gets updated, then I'm probably also OK with using a compressed, static model and needing to occasionally download and deploy new versions.
- dan0- 8y ago
  DeepSpeech is not a voice corpus, that would be Mozilla's Common Voice project that Mycroft users are also contributing to. DeepSpeech offers trained models that are about 70% right, but none of them use the Common Voice corpus yet. I think that plus recent changes to the codebase should produce a much better transcription, but I don't have the GPU resources to go and train a model sadly, Mozilla will hopefully release another trained model soon though! I am working on a basic web frontend and API for DeepSpeech: https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend Also, here is Common Voice: https://voice.mozilla.org/en https://voice.mozilla.org/en
  - singularity2001 8y ago
    Keep up the good work ++
singularity2001 8y ago
> can be comfortably run in real-time on a desktop that's progress. how long did it take you to get these things running (including downloads and dependency installation)?
- dan0- 8y ago
  The downloads total a bit above 2GB for Mozilla Deepspeech 0.1.1, but besides that DeepSpeech is quick to set up and pretty performant on my i5-4200U (half realtime transcription) and its even better on my Ryzen box. Going to do some GPU testing tomorrow, need to clean up the docs on the little web frontend/API I've been trying to get ready for production use: https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend
  - singularity2001 8y ago
    I was more interested in 'astonishingly good' Baidu solution. will that install chinese spyware thou? sorry, very cautious about Baidu et al.
    - dan0- 8y ago
      Ah, I just asked a similar question of the person you initially replied to. The Baidu DeepSpeech 2 model seems appealing, but from my brief look on Github I haven't found the model files...
    - dan0- 8y ago
      Not sure, but the results and info OP linked to are quite interesting: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech#released-models https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech#released-models
dan0- 8y ago
Any links to Baidu's DeepSpeech 2 pretrained model? I'm likely looking right past it, spent the past few days playing around with Mozilla DeepSpeech and their pretrained model, building a simple little API and webpags to feed it files: https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend I really want to put DeepSpeech 2 with Baidu's model up against Mozilla's model and see which is better, seems like it could be quite interesting!
- aseipp 8y ago
  https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech#released-models https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech#released-models
  - dan0- 8y ago
    Any chance there is a mirror of the BaiduEN8k Model that isn't in China? I'm getting about 20KB/s when trying to download it, and using a DNS override to 180.76.189.142 for cloud.dlnel.org gets me what looks to be a partial file at slightly less than 200MB in size.

danShumway 8y ago

I'm happy to be wrong about that; I was under the impression that DeepSpeech was available as a data set for training, but not as a trained system in and of itself. My impression is that a lot of the hardware costs from modern AI comes from training and updating the model. So (speaking as a non-expert) it doesn't seem like there's any technological problem with running a model locally on a private network -- you just need access to the model and you need someone else to generate it. And that's exactly what Google isn't providing. It's like they found a way to turn modern AI into even more of a black box. At the point where I'm OK consuming someone else's model and not being able to control how it gets updated, then I'm probably also OK with using a compressed, static model and needing to occasionally download and deploy new versions.

dan0- 8y ago
DeepSpeech is not a voice corpus, that would be Mozilla's Common Voice project that Mycroft users are also contributing to. DeepSpeech offers trained models that are about 70% right, but none of them use the Common Voice corpus yet. I think that plus recent changes to the codebase should produce a much better transcription, but I don't have the GPU resources to go and train a model sadly, Mozilla will hopefully release another trained model soon though! I am working on a basic web frontend and API for DeepSpeech: https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend Also, here is Common Voice: https://voice.mozilla.org/en https://voice.mozilla.org/en
- singularity2001 8y ago
  Keep up the good work ++

singularity2001 8y ago

> can be comfortably run in real-time on a desktop that's progress. how long did it take you to get these things running (including downloads and dependency installation)?

dan0- 8y ago
The downloads total a bit above 2GB for Mozilla Deepspeech 0.1.1, but besides that DeepSpeech is quick to set up and pretty performant on my i5-4200U (half realtime transcription) and its even better on my Ryzen box. Going to do some GPU testing tomorrow, need to clean up the docs on the little web frontend/API I've been trying to get ready for production use: https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend
- singularity2001 8y ago
  I was more interested in 'astonishingly good' Baidu solution. will that install chinese spyware thou? sorry, very cautious about Baidu et al.
  - dan0- 8y ago
    Ah, I just asked a similar question of the person you initially replied to. The Baidu DeepSpeech 2 model seems appealing, but from my brief look on Github I haven't found the model files...
  - dan0- 8y ago
    Not sure, but the results and info OP linked to are quite interesting: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech#released-models https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech#released-models

dan0- 8y ago

Any links to Baidu's DeepSpeech 2 pretrained model? I'm likely looking right past it, spent the past few days playing around with Mozilla DeepSpeech and their pretrained model, building a simple little API and webpags to feed it files: https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/DeepSpeech_Frontend I really want to put DeepSpeech 2 with Baidu's model up against Mozilla's model and see which is better, seems like it could be quite interesting!

aseipp 8y ago
https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech#released-models https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech#released-models
- dan0- 8y ago
  Any chance there is a mirror of the BaiduEN8k Model that isn't in China? I'm getting about 20KB/s when trying to download it, and using a DNS override to 180.76.189.142 for cloud.dlnel.org gets me what looks to be a partial file at slightly less than 200MB in size.