8 ms·

Interesting, why does FB need a speech recognition system?

by sfilargi 8y ago

leesec 8y ago
Because of their many products that support voice features? Messenger, whatsapp, etc...
- sfilargi 8y ago
  Why would you need voice recognition for them? What is the use-case?
  - qeternity 8y ago
    Speech-to-text i.e. dictation? One of the most common use-cases.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - hnauz 8y ago
      That's handled by the system on both Android and iOS. I remain unconvinced.
      - pavlov 8y ago
        Facebook delivers software on many other platforms than just iOS and Android. There’s also the new Portal hardware.
      - baq 8y ago
        yeah well facebook wants to know what you said and not what android told it you said.
      - computerex 8y ago
        The built in offline Android speech recognizer is really bad. Giants like Google and Facebook are blessed with data, and so they can train state of the art speech recognition models (much much better than what you get out of the built in Android recognizer) and then provide speech recognition as a service. They can control the recognition because it happens on their servers and is independent of Android or any other OS. And so FB for instance can send some voice data to their servers and get a text output. And then FB can use text sentiment analysis to get further context about the message. Sadly, most people don't have the speech data to train their own recognizers on large vocabulary systems, and that's even harder for languages that are not English. With exception of Google/Amazon/FB/Microsoft/Baidu/etc other people have to use the API's offered by the above companies to do high fidelity recognition. Which sucks because there is a cost to each recognition. You have to pay someone else to do it. Whereas FB/Amazon/MS/Baidu/etc can do high fidelity recognition offline on large vocabulary and offer it as a service. THIS is why FB wants to make speech recognition systems.
        rhizome 8y ago
        The built in offline Android speech recognizer is really bad. Giants like Google and Facebook are blessed with data, and so they can train state of the art speech recognition models (much much better than what you get out of the built in Android recognizer) and then provide speech recognition as a service. They can control the recognition because it happens on their servers and is independent of Android or any other OS. Is the implication that offline Android recognition does not train on the owner's voice at all? I imagine a lot of phones these days are at least as powerful as the Pentium 200s used to train (successfully!) Dragon Dictate et al 20+ years ago.
        computerex 8y ago
        Well let's forget the offline android recognizer. That's the one that's built in and doesn't go to Google via the internet to get a better accuracy transcription. It's fairly good for what it is but doesn't come close to the accuracy when you go to the google recognition servers via their API's. That's because the models they offer via the recognition services are much larger, robust and better than what you get straight out of Android. These services offered by companies such as Google do not adapt the acoustic model to individual speakers and are therefore known to be speaker independent. Secondly, when I say "train", it is in a totally different context than how you seem to be using the term. You are using it in the context of adapting an acoustic model to a individual speaker to improve the performance. I am talking about building the initial model. Typical RNN or even convolution based algorithms require a lot of time and processing power to train. What's even harder to get than the processing power though is of course, data to train off of.
  - donjoe 8y ago
    Advertisement based on keywords.
    - srbijadotokija 8y ago
      this was never confirmed afaik, but it looks like they are doing just that
  - djohnston 8y ago
    data input that doesn't involve keyboards..
underwater 8y ago
I think Portal has voice control, but is currently using Alexa for most functionality.
rurban 8y ago
Their mobile app most likely records everything being said and transmits it encrypted to their servers, so that they can improve ad targeting.
- pavlov 8y ago
  That’s a nonsense conspiracy theory. Thousands of people have internal access to the full source code for the mobile app. “Ah, but there’s an undetectable binary blob that gets linked in and called without being detected by anyone working on the code,” you say. In that case consider the battery life impact. The power consumption of the Facebook app compares favorably to its social media peers. Is everybody else also recording, encoding and encrypting all the time?
  - sfilargi 8y ago
    I am not saying that the grand-parent is on to something, but I would be careful when calling anything done by them as "nonsense conspiracy theory". They have proved these "conspiracy theories" to be true quite a few times.
    - traek 8y ago
      > They have proved these "conspiracy theories" to be true quite a few times. Such as? Facebook has explicitly denied spying on people's conversations. I can't think of any situations where they have flat out lied about something like that, so I'm curious to hear what conspiracy theories they have proven true.
      - cwkoss 8y ago
        They lied to congress about selling access to users' private messages.
        pavlov 8y ago
        You mean this week’s news that Spotify and Netflix had experimental messaging client integrations years ago? It’s a complete mischaracterisation that Facebook shared private messages with Spotify. By the same logic, you could say Google is sharing your emails with Apple when you access Gmail using the iOS Mail client. Spotify was offering an integrated client to FB’s chat service. This UI integration was a market failure and was discontinued years ago. Of all the things wrong with Facebook, this wasn’t worth the noise.
karmasimida 8y ago
Why not? Facebook as research arm dedicated to play Go/Starcraft also, what do you think their reason is for doing that? They can use a speech recognition system to transcribe videos, just like what Youtube is doing to improve ad targeting and recommendation. Why is this hard to understand?
- sfilargi 8y ago
  No need to be aggressive, as I am not being cynical. I am genuinely asking, because I couldn't see any immediate need for it in their main product.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    But also remember that accessibility for visually impaired folk is often. A regulatory imperative in those product lines.
  - danso 8y ago
    Facebook has its own Alexa/Echo like offering. Not sure if Messenger also has voice functionality.
    - moneil971 8y ago
      It does, you can do video and voice calling from the Messenger app
- nurettin 8y ago
  that would be a bit creepy and opportunistic if fb did that. Yt videos are by and large uploaded for profit. Fb videos are uploaded for storing birthdays and family vacations.
  - dqpb 8y ago
    Could be used for indexing videos for search
bad_good_guy 8y ago
Potential Oculus control option?
matz1 8y ago
speech recognition system is becoming fundamental for all kind of software these days. speech to text input, speech navigation, etc
52358 8y ago
isn't Portal supposed to have it's own voice assistant, Aloha or whatnot?
jka 8y ago
Sending voice messages is a pretty common form of user-to-user messaging in Asia - i.e. record a brief audio snippet instead of tapping out a sentence on a phone keyboard
amelius 8y ago
Interpret the spoken text in posted videos? E.g. for automatic subtitling?
xpaulbettsx 8y ago
https://portal.facebook.com https://portal.facebook.com for one
ArtDev 8y ago
Perhaps to listen in on your voice conversations and serve you ads so relevant its creepy? From a software standpoint, this has never been proven. However, its super weird when it happens to you. For example, I traveled to meet a coworker who was playing a mobile game I had never seen before and we talked about it. I never Googled it or anything like that. Hours later I checked Instagram and the first ad was for the same mobile game. Coincidence? Perhaps the game was simply advertised more in his city than my own? Perhaps our phones being near each other prompted a "friend request suggestion" and then a took that to another level with installed apps? Or just a coincidence and I am thinking too much about it. lol.
Spooky23 8y ago
Totally not because they listen to anyone to profile users or target ads.
gaius 8y ago
So their app can eavesdrop on your conversations to target more ads. Facebook does nothing without an ulterior motive.

Interesting, why does FB need a speech recognition system?

leesec 8y ago

Because of their many products that support voice features? Messenger, whatsapp, etc...

sfilargi 8y ago
Why would you need voice recognition for them? What is the use-case?
- qeternity 8y ago
  Speech-to-text i.e. dictation? One of the most common use-cases.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hnauz 8y ago
    That's handled by the system on both Android and iOS. I remain unconvinced.
    - pavlov 8y ago
      Facebook delivers software on many other platforms than just iOS and Android. There’s also the new Portal hardware.
    - baq 8y ago
      yeah well facebook wants to know what you said and not what android told it you said.
    - computerex 8y ago
      The built in offline Android speech recognizer is really bad. Giants like Google and Facebook are blessed with data, and so they can train state of the art speech recognition models (much much better than what you get out of the built in Android recognizer) and then provide speech recognition as a service. They can control the recognition because it happens on their servers and is independent of Android or any other OS. And so FB for instance can send some voice data to their servers and get a text output. And then FB can use text sentiment analysis to get further context about the message. Sadly, most people don't have the speech data to train their own recognizers on large vocabulary systems, and that's even harder for languages that are not English. With exception of Google/Amazon/FB/Microsoft/Baidu/etc other people have to use the API's offered by the above companies to do high fidelity recognition. Which sucks because there is a cost to each recognition. You have to pay someone else to do it. Whereas FB/Amazon/MS/Baidu/etc can do high fidelity recognition offline on large vocabulary and offer it as a service. THIS is why FB wants to make speech recognition systems.
      - rhizome 8y ago
        The built in offline Android speech recognizer is really bad. Giants like Google and Facebook are blessed with data, and so they can train state of the art speech recognition models (much much better than what you get out of the built in Android recognizer) and then provide speech recognition as a service. They can control the recognition because it happens on their servers and is independent of Android or any other OS. Is the implication that offline Android recognition does not train on the owner's voice at all? I imagine a lot of phones these days are at least as powerful as the Pentium 200s used to train (successfully!) Dragon Dictate et al 20+ years ago.
        computerex 8y ago
        Well let's forget the offline android recognizer. That's the one that's built in and doesn't go to Google via the internet to get a better accuracy transcription. It's fairly good for what it is but doesn't come close to the accuracy when you go to the google recognition servers via their API's. That's because the models they offer via the recognition services are much larger, robust and better than what you get straight out of Android. These services offered by companies such as Google do not adapt the acoustic model to individual speakers and are therefore known to be speaker independent. Secondly, when I say "train", it is in a totally different context than how you seem to be using the term. You are using it in the context of adapting an acoustic model to a individual speaker to improve the performance. I am talking about building the initial model. Typical RNN or even convolution based algorithms require a lot of time and processing power to train. What's even harder to get than the processing power though is of course, data to train off of.
- donjoe 8y ago
  Advertisement based on keywords.
  - srbijadotokija 8y ago
    this was never confirmed afaik, but it looks like they are doing just that
- djohnston 8y ago
  data input that doesn't involve keyboards..

underwater 8y ago

I think Portal has voice control, but is currently using Alexa for most functionality.

rurban 8y ago

Their mobile app most likely records everything being said and transmits it encrypted to their servers, so that they can improve ad targeting.

pavlov 8y ago
That’s a nonsense conspiracy theory. Thousands of people have internal access to the full source code for the mobile app. “Ah, but there’s an undetectable binary blob that gets linked in and called without being detected by anyone working on the code,” you say. In that case consider the battery life impact. The power consumption of the Facebook app compares favorably to its social media peers. Is everybody else also recording, encoding and encrypting all the time?
- sfilargi 8y ago
  I am not saying that the grand-parent is on to something, but I would be careful when calling anything done by them as "nonsense conspiracy theory". They have proved these "conspiracy theories" to be true quite a few times.
  - traek 8y ago
    > They have proved these "conspiracy theories" to be true quite a few times. Such as? Facebook has explicitly denied spying on people's conversations. I can't think of any situations where they have flat out lied about something like that, so I'm curious to hear what conspiracy theories they have proven true.
    - cwkoss 8y ago
      They lied to congress about selling access to users' private messages.
      - pavlov 8y ago
        You mean this week’s news that Spotify and Netflix had experimental messaging client integrations years ago? It’s a complete mischaracterisation that Facebook shared private messages with Spotify. By the same logic, you could say Google is sharing your emails with Apple when you access Gmail using the iOS Mail client. Spotify was offering an integrated client to FB’s chat service. This UI integration was a market failure and was discontinued years ago. Of all the things wrong with Facebook, this wasn’t worth the noise.

karmasimida 8y ago

Why not? Facebook as research arm dedicated to play Go/Starcraft also, what do you think their reason is for doing that? They can use a speech recognition system to transcribe videos, just like what Youtube is doing to improve ad targeting and recommendation. Why is this hard to understand?

sfilargi 8y ago
No need to be aggressive, as I am not being cynical. I am genuinely asking, because I couldn't see any immediate need for it in their main product.
- dnautics 8y ago
  But also remember that accessibility for visually impaired folk is often. A regulatory imperative in those product lines.
- danso 8y ago
  Facebook has its own Alexa/Echo like offering. Not sure if Messenger also has voice functionality.
  - moneil971 8y ago
    It does, you can do video and voice calling from the Messenger app
nurettin 8y ago
that would be a bit creepy and opportunistic if fb did that. Yt videos are by and large uploaded for profit. Fb videos are uploaded for storing birthdays and family vacations.
- dqpb 8y ago
  Could be used for indexing videos for search

bad_good_guy 8y ago

Potential Oculus control option?

matz1 8y ago

speech recognition system is becoming fundamental for all kind of software these days. speech to text input, speech navigation, etc

52358 8y ago

isn't Portal supposed to have it's own voice assistant, Aloha or whatnot?

jka 8y ago

Sending voice messages is a pretty common form of user-to-user messaging in Asia - i.e. record a brief audio snippet instead of tapping out a sentence on a phone keyboard

amelius 8y ago

Interpret the spoken text in posted videos? E.g. for automatic subtitling?

xpaulbettsx 8y ago

https://portal.facebook.com https://portal.facebook.com for one

ArtDev 8y ago

Perhaps to listen in on your voice conversations and serve you ads so relevant its creepy? From a software standpoint, this has never been proven. However, its super weird when it happens to you. For example, I traveled to meet a coworker who was playing a mobile game I had never seen before and we talked about it. I never Googled it or anything like that. Hours later I checked Instagram and the first ad was for the same mobile game. Coincidence? Perhaps the game was simply advertised more in his city than my own? Perhaps our phones being near each other prompted a "friend request suggestion" and then a took that to another level with installed apps? Or just a coincidence and I am thinking too much about it. lol.

Spooky23 8y ago

Totally not because they listen to anyone to profile users or target ads.

gaius 8y ago

So their app can eavesdrop on your conversations to target more ads. Facebook does nothing without an ulterior motive.