Waymo is at the threshold of how speech recognition reached a tipping point through decades of grinding effort. I worked on speech recognition applications in t

Waymo is at the threshold of how speech recognition reached a tipping point through decades of grinding effort. I worked on speech recognition applications in the '80s when the best of it was just barely usable for carefully crafted use cases. Now taxis can be automated well enough if you have the right sensor suite and an exquisitely mapped environment. Waymo can do this for 0.05% of ride hailing riders, if 28M Ubers per day and 100k Waymos per week are reasonably accurate. This is like when connected speech started working with a good mic in a quiet environment. Now automated multi-speaker transcription with background noise, crosstalk, and whatever mic you got works. Back in the day some serious people were convinced speech recognition on that level would be impossible without solving AGI.