4 ms·

FYI, I too looked at his categorisation of what was/was advancing/was not snake oil and didn't exactly agree with all his decisions either. Medical imaging dia

FYI, I too looked at his categorisation of what was/was advancing/was not snake oil and didn't exactly agree with all his decisions either. Medical imaging diagnosis was one of them. Speech recognition/transcription was another. I don't know if it's my accent or my speech patterns(though foreigners regularly compliment my wife and myself on our pronunciation), but the tech hasn't gotten noticeably better for me since the days of Dragon natural speaking, and that was, what...10 years ago? Sure, I can "hey Google/siri/alexa" a handful of predefined commands, but I still have to talk in a sort of stoccato "I am talking to a computer" voice, it still only gets it right 90% of the time, and God help you if you try anything new/natural not in the form of "writing Boolean logic programs with my voice".

dahart 7y ago
I feel like it’s gotten loads better. You can watch as the voice recognition on your phone changes the words it recognizes to match the context in the sentence. Sometimes it gets a word wrong and fixes it after a half second. Google translate does magical things recognizing common phrasing constructions and bad accents, stuff that Dragon could never do. I built a lipsync pipeline for video games based on Dragon a decade ago, and it most definitely was not as good as what I have on my phone today.
- ACow_Adonis 7y ago
  Again, just anecdotally, I don't know if its just me, but most of my experience is of google/apple translate and auto-corrects going from the word I want to a wrong/incorrect one. It is one of my most frustrating everyday software experiences. Not only is it not getting better, its actually getting worse, because before I at least had the correct sentence. Now my correct sentence is mangled as it tries to force corrections/substitutions, and I have to continually go back and manually-correct the auto-correct. It seems to work for me on short pre-formed sentences and toy examples (if you communicate using pre-formed phrases and use well-worn cliches in your writing, it seems to pick up and predict for them). I wonder whether the "increased accuracy" of modern solutions aren't just functionally having access to a larger library of lookup rules of stored common/popular phrases and direct translations (a huge part of practical 'AI' advancement has been on the scaling-infrastructure/collection of new-scales-of-data rather than the AI techniques themselves IMO) effectively mined from its training data, but the moment I try to write or dictate anything new, original, or lengthy and it turns absolutely pear-shaped.
  - dahart 7y ago
    That does sound frustrating. I didn’t mean to discount your experience, it certainly is possible that the additional AI has made it worse for some people, especially if there’s an accent involved. Not to mention that the meme of autocorrect mistakes when texting somewhat backs up your experience on a larger scale. I wonder if the scale and complexity of what they’re doing now compared to last decade is the cause of the regressions, like is the problem being solved much harder by trying to factor in and autocorrect based on context, and causing worse results than pure phoneme detection?

dahart 7y ago

I feel like it’s gotten loads better. You can watch as the voice recognition on your phone changes the words it recognizes to match the context in the sentence. Sometimes it gets a word wrong and fixes it after a half second. Google translate does magical things recognizing common phrasing constructions and bad accents, stuff that Dragon could never do. I built a lipsync pipeline for video games based on Dragon a decade ago, and it most definitely was not as good as what I have on my phone today.

ACow_Adonis 7y ago
Again, just anecdotally, I don't know if its just me, but most of my experience is of google/apple translate and auto-corrects going from the word I want to a wrong/incorrect one. It is one of my most frustrating everyday software experiences. Not only is it not getting better, its actually getting worse, because before I at least had the correct sentence. Now my correct sentence is mangled as it tries to force corrections/substitutions, and I have to continually go back and manually-correct the auto-correct. It seems to work for me on short pre-formed sentences and toy examples (if you communicate using pre-formed phrases and use well-worn cliches in your writing, it seems to pick up and predict for them). I wonder whether the "increased accuracy" of modern solutions aren't just functionally having access to a larger library of lookup rules of stored common/popular phrases and direct translations (a huge part of practical 'AI' advancement has been on the scaling-infrastructure/collection of new-scales-of-data rather than the AI techniques themselves IMO) effectively mined from its training data, but the moment I try to write or dictate anything new, original, or lengthy and it turns absolutely pear-shaped.
- dahart 7y ago
  That does sound frustrating. I didn’t mean to discount your experience, it certainly is possible that the additional AI has made it worse for some people, especially if there’s an accent involved. Not to mention that the meme of autocorrect mistakes when texting somewhat backs up your experience on a larger scale. I wonder if the scale and complexity of what they’re doing now compared to last decade is the cause of the regressions, like is the problem being solved much harder by trying to factor in and autocorrect based on context, and causing worse results than pure phoneme detection?