7 ms·
High-performance speech recognition with no supervision at all
- yboris 5y agoQuick summary via a Tweet: https://twitter.com/nasim_rahaman/status/1395812572037795847 https://twitter.com/nasim_rahaman/status/1395812572037795847
- axiosgunnar 5y agoHilarious how the Arabic „hello“ in that picture is completely mangled since they screwed up ltr rendering (basically instead of hello it says „o l l e h“)
- sirfz 5y agoIn the title image, the Arabic word "ahlan" (welcome) is spelled correctly but left to right instead of right to left (should look like this: أهلا)
- contriban 5y agoIt takes effort to screw up a single word while copy-pasting it from a Google search result page.
- Causality1 5y agoWill Facebook license this tech out? I can't be the only one who's noticed Google's speech recognition has gotten significantly less accurate the last couple of years, probably the result of some cost-cutting strategy.
- simonw 5y agoThey have an open source repo linked from the article here: https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/wav2vec/unsupervised https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/wav2...
- m463 5y agoI wonder if it's less accurate for specific people, but more accurate generally. In other words speech recognition was more accurate in the beginning on english-speaking men, and maybe now it's better for women, kids, people with accents, other languages, etc... They train this on examples of speaking and maybe it's more broad now.
- mvzvm 5y agoWhat in the world are you talking about?
- meekmind 5y agoHe's saying that it might not be getting worse due to a cost-cutting strategy, but rather an attempt to optimize the value for the most possible people.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Causality1 5y agoThat's possible, but it wouldn't explain bizarre behavior like capitalizing random words in the middle of sentences or the absolute refusal to type the word "o'clock".
- tjpnz 5y agoThere was a time a few years back where Google's speech recognition was virtually flawless (at least for my voice) but nowadays it verges on useless. I've had similar experiences with Google Maps (specifically navigation) and Google Translate. My understanding is that the implementation of these products is now mostly ML driven whereas in previous iterations ML was just one aspect of it. Curious to know how much truth there is to that or if I'm just viewing things with rose tinted glasses.
- Causality1 5y agoIndeed. Growing up playing with voice recognition on Windows I knew how to talk to computers. You speak clearly, enunciate your consonants, and keep a consistent pace and even tone. When I used my "computer voice" on Android I could carry on a text or IM conversation with my phone sitting in my pocket. Nowadays it hasn't gotten any better at understanding my natural drawl but the "computer voice" fills the sentences with bizarre punctuation and randomly-capitalized words that make me look like a lunatic. I really don't know just what the hell my phone wants from me anymore.
- imedadel 5y agoFacebook's focus on unsupervised machine learning is a huge plus for under-resourced languages. They had a similar article for unsupervised machine translation[1] before, and I can see how it'll open doors for many African languages. [1] https://engineering.fb.com/2018/08/31/ai-research/unsupervised-machine-translation-a-novel-approach-to-provide-fast-accurate-translations-for-more-languages/ https://engineering.fb.com/2018/08/31/ai-research/unsupervis...
- savant_penguin 5y agoNot only that but it's also great for the English models as well. Many models are trained using the libre speech dataset with 960h of labeled audio. What if you trained with 960000 hours instead??
- garmaine 5y agoLabeled data is easy to come by in popular language though. Just get an Audible subscription.
- callamdelaney 5y agoHopefully they license it to Tesla so that my car stops misinterpreting 'call Jodie' as 'cool jodi'.
- Asymmetryk 5y agoso close... you need to put your car in jabberish (jedi jibberish) command console which will then correctly understand "cool jodi" as "Cool Jedi" and enter mind control mode after which you'll only have to think of calling Jodie and the other phone will be ringing on speaker...
- skybrian 5y agoHow does Facebook use speech recognition in its own products?
- yalok 5y agoe.g., transcription of live streaming events?
- jschmitz28 5y agoMakes sense - transcribing speech from all uploaded video seems like it would be valuable for identifying interests and serving more personalized advertisements. For example, in a video taken at the beach where someone says “wow that looks fun” (in any language) and there is a boat in the frame, you could serve them boat ads.
- joeyspn 5y agoHaven't you ever wondered if some mobile apps listen to you? And then you get accurate targeted ads...
- joering2 5y agoPeople keep downvoting me, because "we need you to send a proof", but sorry I don't want to share Snowden's fate, but I know for fact IOS/Android, most TVs and major TV cable boxes (USA) are indeed analyzing your speech and sending back home _keywords_ from your conversations. I can imagine that's how they avoid being sued into oblivion for clear 4A violation, as metatags have been considered not a violation of your privacy by courts. But go ahead, try it yourself! Have a conversation about having children with your loved one, next to your phones and your TV box, no online search required. Give it few hours and turn your Sling on, or browse some Amazon/Youtube. All of sudden you will see ads for products and companies you have never heard of, trying to sell you diapers or baby cribs. Where do you think it came from? Google, as of today, still is unable to read your mind.
- astrange 5y ago
- jsemrau 5y agoWhy would FB work on such a tech?
- bredren 5y agoPerhaps having the freedom to work on these problems is necessary to keep talent. Positive stories associated with the brand seem especially needed these days. Perhaps FB keeps other “rainy day” projects as well.
- superqd 5y agoI was contacted by their recruiters recently and started getting warmed up on their interviewing, etc. However, this was back in December when they put out ads against Apple's choice to allow users to opt out of tracking. It kind of made it difficult to want to follow through on the interview process after that... so I didn't.
- unityByFreedom 5y agoYes, LeCun is still head of AI research there, and he's a big draw for talent. Any advancements like this (unsupervised learning) are a huge boon for technology. Often, the most time consuming part of machine learning is creating the labeled dataset. It's amazing to see what can be achieved without one.
- tempodox 5y agoTo get even more data to analyze, sell, and leak.
- marcodiego 5y agoDon't want to repeat a comment, so I'll link it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236880
- yorwba 5y agoIt's open-source: https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/wav2vec/unsupervised https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/wav2...
- shakascchen 5y agoIt seems that the discriminator tests if the output of the generator obeys the pattern of a language. Isn't it still possible that after training the generator outputs the text wrong for the input? On the other words, the output is understandable but actually not what the sound indicate?
- unityByFreedom 5y agoContext may help determine the intended word. Certainly any such system can be wrong sometimes.
- unityByFreedom 5y agoThat's incredible. Since translation can be done this way too, it may truly be a short time until widespread use of babel-fish tech becomes reality. What a world!
- croes 5y agoNope, like autonmous driving the problem will be the last 20%
- unityByFreedom 5y agoJust because one overhyped tech is not working out does not mean all new tech will fail. We already have noise cancellation, good tiny batteries, fast wireless internet, and all the tech to learn spoken languages without supervision! Autonomous driving has a much higher bar for accuracy.
- croes 5y agoAre you sure? A translation error played part in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. https://pangeanic.com/knowledge/the-worst-translation-mistake-in-history/ https://pangeanic.com/knowledge/the-worst-translation-mistak... Language has great ambiguity, depends heavily on time period, context and tone. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/2chfge/you_need_some_solid_dick_from_iron_man_captain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/2chfge/you_need_some... That could lead to problems even without translation.
- DennisP 5y agoSo maybe don't use the tech yet in such high-stakes situations. In my personal life, an automated translation error is very unlikely to cause a serious problem, while an automated driving error could kill me. (Fwiw, if you read the comments at your second link, you'll find the image is a fake.)
- croes 5y ago
- renox 5y agoIf it's unsupervised why English transcription is much better than the other languages?
- nharada 5y agoIt looks like many of the components used are still English biased, for example the off the shelf tool they used to generate phonemes from text was a state of the art system for English and a more general but less performant version for other languages.
- f6v 5y agoWhenever FB translated a comment for me, it was a complete gibberish. I'm a bit sceptical about their efforts. Is it really good quality?
- jonplackett 5y agoQuestion: are there any efforts to communally create / crowd source training material for neural networks? I’m thinking language like this, but also labelled imagery for, for example, face detection, which works better on white people. Has anyone attempted to create a way for people to create and donate labelled data to a dataset?
- bowaggoner 5y agoThis project is more on the academic side -- disclaimer, I was involved in it, but it's led by Justin Harris at Microsoft Research: "Sharing Updatable Models on Blockchain" https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B The idea is that the smart contract is a learning algorithm, and people can donate data to a public repository stored on a blockchain. The learned model is publicly available for everyone. People can also receive incentives for donating data in some implementations.
- wiml 5y agoCommon Voice ( https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/ https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/ ) is one such project. I've urged the people I know who have less-common accents to contribute, but I'm not sure they have. Good, high quality, wide coverage, labeled datasets are expensive to assemble. Most companies don't want to give them away. You can find a number from academia, though.
- bainsfather 5y agoCould someone explain what is being done here? I see they are using a GAN, and doing unsupervised training. But then they appear to compare their model to supervised-trained models. How do they do this? Do they tack a supervised-trained model onto the end of their unsupervised model? I imagine they must do supervised training at some point, else how can they convert sounds to text?
- antpls 5y agoThat's great, but it still performs 2 times worst than the best supervised model. Also : "The discriminator itself is also a neural network. We train it by feeding it the output of the generator as well as showing it real text from various sources that were phonemized." Is the "real text from various sources that were phonemized" a manually labelized database? If Yes, that step is supervised, which makes the whole thing actually supervised to some extent
- exporectomy 5y agoIf phonemization is converting words to phonetic symbols, it could be taken from existing human-written dictionaries automatically.
- scythmic_waves 5y agoWas anyone else surprised that they used simple k-means for clustering the phonemes? I skimmed the paper and it looks like they use a really high k (128), presumably to avoid having to do an elbow-plot like approach. Maybe the computational benefits of such a simple algorithm outweighed the potentially bad clusters. Thoughts? I'll try to read the paper in more depth later in case they explain the choice and I missed it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]