25 ms·

And yet, Google has way better speech recognition than Alexa.

by curiousDog 8y ago

merb 8y ago
and google cloud customers might get a google home for free.
remir 8y ago
To be fair, Google has been working on speech recognition for longer and likely possess more data than Amazon.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Is this why Google gave everyone free phone calls and voice mail for years?
  - servercobra 8y ago
    Yes, along with their 411 service at the start.
  - slondr 8y ago
    Almost certainly. They also pushed their voice assistant on Android almost as hard as Apple pushed Siri. Integrating it into default home screens, keyboards, etc.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 > Google had stated that the company originally implemented GOOG-411 to build a large phoneme database from users' voice queries. This phoneme database, in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching
  - RandallBrown 8y ago
    Google made a 411 service a long time ago for this exact reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
Baeocystin 8y ago
I'm surprised at the number of people saying there's a noticeable difference. I've been using Dots for a few months, now, and it pretty much understands me every time, even with the vent hood of the range on, etc. I did have one odd error, where when I named one of my lamps 'halogen', Alexa would always ask back "did you mean halogen?" with the exact same pronunciation I had used. Then proceed to turn it off or on like I'd asked in the first place. This struck me as more of a bug than anything else, and I worked around it by just using a different name. But still, if that's the only listening error I've dealt with after several months' use, I'm impressed.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  > when I named one of my lamps 'halogen', Alexa would always ask back "did you mean halogen?" with the exact same pronunciation I had used. Maybe due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping ?
  - Baeocystin 8y ago
    An interesting thought. In my case, though, I live and work in the bay area of California, so no H-dropping, and the accent I use is probably the one that is the most common in terms of use for a training set. (I was saying 'hale-oh-gen', as was Alexa, FWIW. Now I'm curious if others can repeat the same error!)

And yet, Google has way better speech recognition than Alexa.

merb 8y ago

and google cloud customers might get a google home for free.

remir 8y ago

To be fair, Google has been working on speech recognition for longer and likely possess more data than Amazon.

reaperducer 8y ago
Is this why Google gave everyone free phone calls and voice mail for years?
- servercobra 8y ago
  Yes, along with their 411 service at the start.
- slondr 8y ago
  Almost certainly. They also pushed their voice assistant on Android almost as hard as Apple pushed Siri. Integrating it into default home screens, keyboards, etc.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 > Google had stated that the company originally implemented GOOG-411 to build a large phoneme database from users' voice queries. This phoneme database, in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  Google made a 411 service a long time ago for this exact reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411

Baeocystin 8y ago

I'm surprised at the number of people saying there's a noticeable difference. I've been using Dots for a few months, now, and it pretty much understands me every time, even with the vent hood of the range on, etc. I did have one odd error, where when I named one of my lamps 'halogen', Alexa would always ask back "did you mean halogen?" with the exact same pronunciation I had used. Then proceed to turn it off or on like I'd asked in the first place. This struck me as more of a bug than anything else, and I worked around it by just using a different name. But still, if that's the only listening error I've dealt with after several months' use, I'm impressed.

B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
> when I named one of my lamps 'halogen', Alexa would always ask back "did you mean halogen?" with the exact same pronunciation I had used. Maybe due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping ?
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  An interesting thought. In my case, though, I live and work in the bay area of California, so no H-dropping, and the accent I use is probably the one that is the most common in terms of use for a training set. (I was saying 'hale-oh-gen', as was Alexa, FWIW. Now I'm curious if others can repeat the same error!)