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Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition (2010)
- DoItToMe81 3y agoI wonder what the author would think nowadays. I've used voice transcription software recently, and it's incredibly accurate. For Anglosphere accents, at least.
- unlikelymordant 3y agoI enjoyed reading this article. I was doing research on speech recognition in the 2005 to 2010 period, and the article sums up the feeling. Everything was based on HMMs but there was no clear path to getting HMM performance up from where it capped out,or any idea of what models could work better. Deep learning came along and quickly supplanted all the old stuff. It seems like speech recognition has again plateaued but at a much higher accuracy, though its not inconceivable something better than transformers comes along and improves things some more. It seems like the next big leap may be combining the text understanding of GPT with waveform data.
- unicoded 3y agoWhat would be interesting is if Google took the chat GPT approach to better train itself. For instance, every time you speak to Google, it doesn't just 'guess' what you're saying, rather, it will present you with 3 options of the most closely sounding things for you to pick from. And by picking, you train the model.
- seanhunter 3y agoReinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) as you have described here is pretty common in voice recognition.[1] I don't have any inside scoop but I'd be very surprised if there isn't any RLHF going on in these applications. edit to add: The whisper paper mentions using RLHF as a possible path to improve accuracy[2] [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10462-022-10224-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10462-022-10224-2 gives many examples [2] https://cdn.openai.com/papers/whisper.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/papers/whisper.pdf
- wiz21c 3y agoWhen you say "plateaued" again, do you have example ? I follow speech recognition like an average engineer and I mostly encounter "success" stories. So I'm afraid that I see things with rosy glasses. Do you have some examples where it fails in a meaningful way (that is, it fails on apparently simple, or usual, scenarios).
- hanselot 3y agoGoogle's SR running on our xiaomi spy devices in my house consistently gets things way wrong. Pretty much any SR I have ever used on any device seems incredibly bad. Obviously these devices don't use whisper etc, but even so, these are sold to consumers and 50% of the time they don't get the prompt correctly. We have "smart bulbs" that are connected to this spy network, which means that if I want to turn off a light, if I don't want to be shat on my by my partner I can't just turn off the switch, but rather stand pointlessly trying to turn off/on the lights by yelling at a fucking box in my lounge. I hate this so much more than you could ever begin to imagine. And somehow, all these "success" stories has not yet been enough for him to open his eyes. People will buy any shit and then convince themselves that they have "success" stories. Lets not even breach the topic of the fact that I have been using computer vision for years to do cool shit, but no, lets buy shit xiaomi cameras that have no API to interface with, so the absolute best case scenario for me knowing what's on the camera, is opening their piece of shit app and waiting 10-30 seconds for them to figure out how to connect over our network using their own fucking API. Since I'm on this tangent now, I would love to pay special mention to their PIECE OF SHIT KETTLE Which is supposed to be a smart kettle, but the one fucking thing you would want to be able to do remotely is not supported. Oh, you wanted to boil your kettle from your desk? Well Fuck you!
- amelius 3y ago> Oh, you wanted to boil your kettle from your desk? Besides a right to repair, we should also have a right to API.
- kybernetikos 3y agoMaybe it could be enforced via stricter recycling and warranty laws for devices that don't allow you to control them / update them / root them.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoWhisper is pretty good honestly. It gets my french accent in english and french slang, without having to tell it what language I'm going to speak first. That's impressive.
- courgette 3y agoExactly, the accent bump is behind us. I get good transcripts of my meetings even with my tick accent
- regularfry 3y agoI was at a conference yesterday where they had live transcription of the speakers onto big screens by the stage. On this occasion it was a human stenographer in the back-end, but what was remarkable from is that if you didn't already know that, you'd guess from the error rate (not perfect, with difficulties that made sense in context) and the delay (bounced to another continent and back) that it was something like Whisper running locally. All the more so if you happened to know that one of the organisers has been running local AI meetups. It seems to me like the only way up from here, now, is to aim for better than the average human stenographer. You'd have to have a system capable of reasoning "ah, what I heard was Y but they must have really meant X" when X involves knowledge that couldn't possibly be predicted from the context, like a foreign name coming up for the first time. I can believe that if the stenographer had more domain-specific knowledge that they wouldn't have made some of the errors they did, but we're already off into capabilities that are as good as an extremely rare type of human today.
- its-summertime 3y agoWhat has happened since then? I know Common Voice has come and gone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Voice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Voice https://github.com/coqui-ai/STT https://github.com/coqui-ai/STT And I've seen some neural approaches too No idea where to look for comparisons though.
- Baeocystin 3y ago>I know Common Voice has come and gone From https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en: Today's Progress- 22/2400, help us get to our goal! Ouch. I remember contributing to it for a while, quite some time ago. Did it just not pan out to be as useful as expected?
- adastra22 3y agoWhisper is the best out there right now: https://openai.com/research/whisper https://openai.com/research/whisper
- Tor3 3y agoSpeech recognition won't do much for my language.. with no official spoken language (and that's not wanted either), but hundreds of very different dialects. Anything existing right now is pretty much useless, but on the other hand I've never really found speech to be a particularly useful input method.
- elkos 3y agooh that's pretty interesting, would you like to share more on the specifics of that?
- PetitPrince 3y agoI think OP is referring to Swiss German --- dialects are very local (I heard it even differs from valley to valley in the Alps) and often difficult to understand (Wallisertiitsch -- one of the mountain dialect -- is often brought as an example of an unintelligible favor of German), but official and government matters are conducted in standard German (with only few differences with the one spoken in Germany).
- lutorm 3y agoSpeech isn't a particularly useful input method ... until you lose the use of your hands. Then it suddenly is a lot more attractive.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoEven with my hands, voice-search on Apple TV, including the YouTube app, is very capable and accurate.
- tsimionescu 3y agoOnly if you happen to only search for English titles. Try to search for a foreign song in English (say, La Marseillaise), and the results quickly become next to useless.
- 3y ago
- elchief 3y agoDespite deep learning, Google still suggested "pies park" when I asked for "pyspark". To be fair, there is a Pies Park in Cincinnati. I don't live in Cincinnati though
- bdhcuidbebe 3y agowtf is pyspark
- riceart 3y agoSomething that anyone or more importantly any model with an iota of familiarity with machine learning should be familiar with.
- bdhcuidbebe 3y ago[flagged]
- seanhunter 3y agoYou could of course search for yourself, but it's a python library[1] for interfacing with "Spark"[2], the Apache large scale data processing framework. [1] https://pypi.org/project/pyspark/ https://pypi.org/project/pyspark/ [2] https://spark.apache.org/ https://spark.apache.org/
- GaggiX 3y agoWithout the context it would be difficult for a human too, despite our biological net.
- Stratoscope 3y agoSomewhere I have an old T-shirt from when I was consulting for Apple. It had a sketch of a trashed-out beach with all kinds of garbage and debris. The caption was: I helped Apple wreck a nice beach
- wiz21c 3y agoHmmm... Maybe because I'm not a native speaker, but, well, I don't get it :-) Could you explain ?
- Stratoscope 3y agoTry saying it out loud several times without thinking about the words at all, but only the sounds your voice is making as you say them: I helped Apple wreck a nice beach I helped Apple reck a nize beach I helped Apple reck ug nize beach I helped Apple reckug nize peach I helped Apple recognize speech!
- orls 3y ago“Recognise speech” / “wreck a nice beach” can sound similar (if you allow for some imprecisions, slurring, accents, etc, like noisy real-world data has). The relevant term here is _phonemes_, the individual chunks of sounds that make the phrases up; these two phrases have shared or similar phonemes in typical English diction. e.g the first two sounds are both “reh”, “cuh”
- donavanm 3y agoIn english its a near homophone (sounds the same as) “I helped apple recognize speech.” Its a joke about working on language recognition and still getting it wrong.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ZeljkoS 3y agoIt is mentioned in the top article: Saying “recognize speech” makes a sound that can be indistinguishable from “wreck a nice beach.”
- villgax 3y agoDid not age well