3 ms·

Sorry to be pedantic, but Siri was released 2011 and Google Home 2016. With all the recent progress on LLMs, people forget that these “old” assistants are rathe

Sorry to be pedantic, but Siri was released 2011 and Google Home 2016. With all the recent progress on LLMs, people forget that these “old” assistants are rather recent developments.

retrac 3y ago
I've been following speech recognition, in particular, since the mid-90s. Around 2000, after many hours of training the best speech recognition software available commercially, with a slight speech impediment (which does not confuse people, for some reason) I personally concluded that even tailored speech recognition of general speech for a specific person was not viable yet. General purpose speech recognition of an arbitrary speaker perhaps with an accent that was even 80% accurate would be a long, long time away. If you had asked me to guess I'd probably have said after 2050. I remember a presentation by Bill Gates, about the cutting edge statistical modelling based translation and speech recognition at Microsoft, similar to what Google was doing. The software was live-transcribing him, well enough that he could be understood. I was floored. Assuming this wasn't tailored to Bill specifically for the demo, it was revolutionary technology of the kind I had expected to take much longer to develop. That was 2008. At the time the notion that speech might become a common interface still seemed rather far-fetched to many. By 2018 such tech was everywhere. Deep learning based models have now closed much of the remaining gap in just the last couple years.
gdiamos 3y ago
You are right, but Adam Cheyer (the Siri founder) worked on it for a long time before it was sold to Apple. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO
- woodson 3y ago
  Of course, but going from DARPA PAL and CALO to Siri is like going from Mikolov et al. (2013)’s word2vec to ChatGPT.

3 ms·

Sorry to be pedantic, but Siri was released 2011 and Google Home 2016. With all the recent progress on LLMs, people forget that these “old” assistants are rathe

by woodson 3y ago

Sorry to be pedantic, but Siri was released 2011 and Google Home 2016. With all the recent progress on LLMs, people forget that these “old” assistants are rather recent developments.

retrac 3y ago
I've been following speech recognition, in particular, since the mid-90s. Around 2000, after many hours of training the best speech recognition software available commercially, with a slight speech impediment (which does not confuse people, for some reason) I personally concluded that even tailored speech recognition of general speech for a specific person was not viable yet. General purpose speech recognition of an arbitrary speaker perhaps with an accent that was even 80% accurate would be a long, long time away. If you had asked me to guess I'd probably have said after 2050. I remember a presentation by Bill Gates, about the cutting edge statistical modelling based translation and speech recognition at Microsoft, similar to what Google was doing. The software was live-transcribing him, well enough that he could be understood. I was floored. Assuming this wasn't tailored to Bill specifically for the demo, it was revolutionary technology of the kind I had expected to take much longer to develop. That was 2008. At the time the notion that speech might become a common interface still seemed rather far-fetched to many. By 2018 such tech was everywhere. Deep learning based models have now closed much of the remaining gap in just the last couple years.
gdiamos 3y ago
You are right, but Adam Cheyer (the Siri founder) worked on it for a long time before it was sold to Apple. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO
- woodson 3y ago
  Of course, but going from DARPA PAL and CALO to Siri is like going from Mikolov et al. (2013)’s word2vec to ChatGPT.