4 ms·

Audiobooks could be another resource, but they’ll only give you a narrator’s intonation. On the other hand, at some point it may become easier to train people

by kd5bjo 7y ago

Audiobooks could be another resource, but they’ll only give you a narrator’s intonation. On the other hand, at some point it may become easier to train people to speak in a certain way to computers instead of training computers to understand the unclear mumblings of casual speech.

kaibee 7y ago
I don't really see any issues with speech-to-text when I use google assistant. The real lack is in intelligence, even for basic things. I ask Google to navigate to Wegmans. It always insists on asking me which one. Yes it cleverly lets me say, "the closest one", but this becomes a whole lot less clever when you have to tell it "the closest one" every single time. There has never been a single case where I would prefer to drive further to a store that has exactly identical layouts between them. But you can't tell it "the closest one, always".
- qayxc 7y ago
  Lucky you is a probably a native (US) English speaker. I dare you to try any STT in more "niche" languages or dialects. US English should not be considered the be-all-end-all indicator for progress in this area of research.
est31 7y ago
> Audiobooks could be another resource Yes, that's in fact the source of the commonly cited LibriSpeech dataset. It used publicly available recordings from the LibriVox project and has done some cleaning steps as well as alignment of the transcript with the audio to arrive at 1000 hours of cleaned up audio. The M-AILABS dataset uses LibriVox as well, among other sources, to arrive at 1000 hours of cleaned up data in various european languages. Overall there's still a large untapped potential in LibriVox data: https://gist.github.com/est31/1e195c55fab8f95a72393db1519da107 https://gist.github.com/est31/1e195c55fab8f95a72393db1519da1... But you'll have to give up properties like gender balancing in your dataset that then has to be counteracted during the learning process, e.g. by having gender-custom learning rates.
- lunixbochs 7y ago
  Facebook’s librilight taps this potential. They have a script for easily fetching an entire language from librivox, and I have a pipeline on top of that for book fetching and transcript alignment that I’ve successfully trained from. I think the next step here needs to be auto-finding librivox source books that aren’t in e.g. Gutenberg. I only auto-found books for 75% of English. Only found books for 20% of German. I don’t actually know where to look beyond Gutenberg for books that don’t have easily linked text. Common crawl? Librivox forums? (Or you can take Facebook’s semi-supervised approach and generate a transcript from thin air instead, but imo that will work better for English than languages that don’t have good baseline models yet)

by kd5bjo 7y ago

kaibee 7y ago

I don't really see any issues with speech-to-text when I use google assistant. The real lack is in intelligence, even for basic things. I ask Google to navigate to Wegmans. It always insists on asking me which one. Yes it cleverly lets me say, "the closest one", but this becomes a whole lot less clever when you have to tell it "the closest one" every single time. There has never been a single case where I would prefer to drive further to a store that has exactly identical layouts between them. But you can't tell it "the closest one, always".

qayxc 7y ago
Lucky you is a probably a native (US) English speaker. I dare you to try any STT in more "niche" languages or dialects. US English should not be considered the be-all-end-all indicator for progress in this area of research.

est31 7y ago

> Audiobooks could be another resource Yes, that's in fact the source of the commonly cited LibriSpeech dataset. It used publicly available recordings from the LibriVox project and has done some cleaning steps as well as alignment of the transcript with the audio to arrive at 1000 hours of cleaned up audio. The M-AILABS dataset uses LibriVox as well, among other sources, to arrive at 1000 hours of cleaned up data in various european languages. Overall there's still a large untapped potential in LibriVox data: https://gist.github.com/est31/1e195c55fab8f95a72393db1519da107 https://gist.github.com/est31/1e195c55fab8f95a72393db1519da1... But you'll have to give up properties like gender balancing in your dataset that then has to be counteracted during the learning process, e.g. by having gender-custom learning rates.

lunixbochs 7y ago
Facebook’s librilight taps this potential. They have a script for easily fetching an entire language from librivox, and I have a pipeline on top of that for book fetching and transcript alignment that I’ve successfully trained from. I think the next step here needs to be auto-finding librivox source books that aren’t in e.g. Gutenberg. I only auto-found books for 75% of English. Only found books for 20% of German. I don’t actually know where to look beyond Gutenberg for books that don’t have easily linked text. Common crawl? Librivox forums? (Or you can take Facebook’s semi-supervised approach and generate a transcript from thin air instead, but imo that will work better for English than languages that don’t have good baseline models yet)