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Which one can give the answer a fraction of a second faster, or who's voice sounds less robotic means little to me. I am more interested in knowing about speec

by z92 14y ago

Which one can give the answer a fraction of a second faster, or who's voice sounds less robotic means little to me. I am more interested in knowing about speech recognition capabilities, edge cases handling, frequency of getting something wrong, accented speech recognition capabilities, artificial intelligence maturity and depth and breadth of the knowledge base the systems use. But this video has focused on the wrong things. I was expecting that the presenter would be asking both some hard but useful questions and show us which one comes out with the right answer.

molmalo 14y ago
In almost all of the things you mentioned, google has the advantage to make a better product. They have an enormous power to train their creation, to achieve a higher level in terms of speech recognition and understanding. I'm not saying that they are already there, only that they have what is needed. But i really don't know how far are they willing too go, as taking it too far away could end up being counterproductive to them, as they earn money showing ads in their results, so they need people using their website. That's why they released chrome now in iOS.
- simonster 14y ago
  > In almost all of the things you mentioned, google has the advantage to make a better product. They have an enormous power to train their creation, to achieve a higher level in terms of speech recognition and understanding. I'm not saying that they are already there, only that they have what is needed. I'm not sure why you think this. Both Apple and Google probably have vast amounts of unlabeled voice data that they could use to train their speech recognition engines. Just having a product gives you that. Either would need to collect labeled voice data for training purposes, and both have plenty of money to do this. As far as understanding goes, having a shitton of training data may not help all that much. What you really need is a superior algorithm. While one could argue that Google's engineers have more expertise in this regard, NLP isn't really either company's specialty, and Apple can hire smart people too. I think the advantage Google has is that they can do search better. That's basically what this comparison shows. The reason Google Now is faster is that Google does search better. I would think that Google should also be able to get Now to answer harder questions, but this demo doesn't show that, and in that respect I think it's a bit of a disappointment. I was expecting to see Google Now do things Siri can't, but it isn't yet clear that it can.
rryan 14y ago
Well, I can't seem to find the raw source material -- but here's a news article about the relative accuracies of Google vs. Siri. 86% accuracy (Google) vs. 68% accuracy (Siri). This is not surprising. Google has been doing question answering on web search for many years now. I believe it started answering direct free-form questions in its oneboxen in 2007 -- maybe earlier. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/29/minneapolis-street-test-google-gets-a-b-apples-siri-gets-a-d/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/29/minneapolis-street-te...

by z92 14y ago

molmalo 14y ago

In almost all of the things you mentioned, google has the advantage to make a better product. They have an enormous power to train their creation, to achieve a higher level in terms of speech recognition and understanding. I'm not saying that they are already there, only that they have what is needed. But i really don't know how far are they willing too go, as taking it too far away could end up being counterproductive to them, as they earn money showing ads in their results, so they need people using their website. That's why they released chrome now in iOS.

simonster 14y ago
> In almost all of the things you mentioned, google has the advantage to make a better product. They have an enormous power to train their creation, to achieve a higher level in terms of speech recognition and understanding. I'm not saying that they are already there, only that they have what is needed. I'm not sure why you think this. Both Apple and Google probably have vast amounts of unlabeled voice data that they could use to train their speech recognition engines. Just having a product gives you that. Either would need to collect labeled voice data for training purposes, and both have plenty of money to do this. As far as understanding goes, having a shitton of training data may not help all that much. What you really need is a superior algorithm. While one could argue that Google's engineers have more expertise in this regard, NLP isn't really either company's specialty, and Apple can hire smart people too. I think the advantage Google has is that they can do search better. That's basically what this comparison shows. The reason Google Now is faster is that Google does search better. I would think that Google should also be able to get Now to answer harder questions, but this demo doesn't show that, and in that respect I think it's a bit of a disappointment. I was expecting to see Google Now do things Siri can't, but it isn't yet clear that it can.

rryan 14y ago

Well, I can't seem to find the raw source material -- but here's a news article about the relative accuracies of Google vs. Siri. 86% accuracy (Google) vs. 68% accuracy (Siri). This is not surprising. Google has been doing question answering on web search for many years now. I believe it started answering direct free-form questions in its oneboxen in 2007 -- maybe earlier. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/29/minneapolis-street-test-google-gets-a-b-apples-siri-gets-a-d/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/29/minneapolis-street-te...