7 ms·

This Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition

75 points by hodgesmr 12y ago

kleiba 12y ago
"Voice recognition" sounds more reminiscent of speaker identification than speech recognition to me. Although I don't work on that myself, my day job is in a related field, and even IBM's "speech to text" is a term I never hear being used (unlike for instance "text to speech"). People around me either say "speech recognition" or "ASR" (for automatic speech recognition). I'd be interested to learn, though, if / where alternative terms are in more wide-spread use.
- woodson 12y ago
  I agree. I find the use of the term odd and it is not commonly used in an academic context; however, I think I recall having seen it being used informally in the context of voice commands (i.e., controlling a PC or appliance) or, more generally, voice user interfaces.
anatari 12y ago
Voice recognition is not in an uncanny valley. Uncanny valley means there is a point where something that is less real is better than something that is more real. Pixar improves the scene by adding elements that are unrealistic. Another example is a preference for lower frame rate movies. Right now, every incremental improvement to voice recognition improves its usefulness. It might appear that we're in an uncanny valley because voice recognition is barely usable right now versus completely unusable in the past, but there is no one that prefers worst voice recognition over better voice recognition.
- amelius 12y ago
  > The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of aesthetics which holds that when features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some observers. The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of beings as subjects move toward a healthy, natural likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability. Wording by wikipedia. So apparently, there might be points on the graph where a slight increase in recognition performance actually freaks out some users.
- saraid216 12y ago
  > but there is no one that prefers worst voice recognition over better voice recognition. Siri versus XBox in his post? Maybe you're using different metrics for what's better or worse.
- modeless 12y ago
  Of course nobody prefers less accurate transcription, but we're talking about more than transcription here. It's entirely reasonable to prefer a "command line" style interface like the XBox over a "conversational" style interface like Siri for the reason that the "conversational" style interface is less reliable even though it's in some sense more "real".
- sumitviii 12y ago
  I think the OP referred to Uncanny valley for the graph. Think of that graph as the utility derived from voice recognition.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- matthew-wegner 12y ago
  I think there is a real danger that people are modifying/learning how to speak to computer voice recognition software. If voice recognition can't quickly become able to parse natural language, it will inevitably have to parse "I'm talking a dumb computer" cadence and inflection instead. Incremental improvements are very bad in this regard. These things are hard to reverse, too (people still speak with a very distinct "I'm speaking on a telephone" cadence today).
  - woodson 12y ago
    IMHO, people (and hence language) will always adapt in certain ways to get the message across. People already learned how to "google" and expect the same style of search queries to be effective elsewhere. When speaking on the telephone, people tend to slightly change their voice to counteract the channel noise (with acoustic consequences such as increased fundamental frequency ["pitch"], etc.). I would be surprised if a similar adaptation didn't happen for human-computer voice interaction, which would ultimately help making it work well enough to be useful. (Of course, using speech recognition to transcribe human-to-human interaction will still be barely usable..)
- jimmaswell 12y ago
  In text adventures there was a limited grammar that the parser understood that was English-like, which you had to express your actions in: get lamp, put lamp on table, eat fish, look sword. This is easier than if the parser tried to let you use fancy English sentences that it'd probably get wrong often and that you would make more mistakes in because the line is blurred between what you're allowed to say or not. That would be a point between the simplistic text adventure grammar and perfect natural language parsing, with the simpler grammar being preferable. I can see the same being true for voice commands.
  - lsaferite 12y ago
    As a side note, it might be funny to hook one of these voice command systems up to a z-machine VM. The command set is very limited as you pointed out, so it should easily be able to handle the input side. And the voices, while still robotic, seem pretty good as well. With games like Zork being fully text based you could easily turn it into a conversational game.
idbehold 12y ago
> The Uncanny Valley is a term that originated from the computer animation industry. Uhh, I don't think so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley#Etymology
- soylentcola 12y ago
  In fairness, this is followed up with: > In 1992, while finishing A Bug’s Life, Pixar had to build a digital valley for Buzz Lightyear to drive his Ford® F-150™ pickup through on the way to the hospital so he get a vasectomy. So I'm pretty sure the author is being deliberately silly.
  - zik 12y ago
    Just not actually funny.
tashoecraft 12y ago
I'd really like it if someone condensed that article and removed all attempts to be funny or sound extremely clever.
- holman 12y ago
  I'll give it a shot: > Buzz Lightyear walks into a bar called the "Uncanny Valley" and asks the bartender for a vodka soda. The bartender gives him a vasectomy. Voice recognition is important!
- smlacy 12y ago
  "Siri's voice recognition is kind of bad some of the time. I've extrapolated this observation to all other voice recognition systems"
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    I have been extremely impressed by Google's voice recognition. It got things right that I never thought it would, such as homophones or proper names.
    - gok 12y ago
      I don't mean to belittle you or Google's speech team, but neither homophones nor proper names are considered hard problems in modern automatic speech recognition.
      - StavrosK 12y ago
        I don't remember the case exactly, but it was something that was hard to resolve, at least it seemed so to me.
- than 12y ago
  Robots don't have a sense of humor. And the article is about how voice recognition is just in its infancy.
- 12y ago
Jgrubb 12y ago
This post reads like he's experimenting with the Uncanny Valley of Auto-generated Blogging.
aaronpk 12y ago
Is it just me or is the author using the term "Uncanny Valley" completely wrong? Ignoring the silly Pixar story, I still don't understand how voice recognition (or more accurately, speech recognition) is currently in the uncanny valley. You know when your GPS says "recalculating" in a condescending voice? That's the uncanny valley of text-to-speech.
- recursive 12y ago
  I'm no valley expert, but it seems to me that uncanny valley refers to an artificial system intended to mimic a natural one. It mostly gets the mimicry right, but not enough that we are completely fooled. This freaks some people out. Siri's UI intends to mimic a person that understands what you are saying. In practice, it gets it wrong in hilarious and frustrating ways, breaking the illusion. So "uncanny valley" seems ok to me.
  - brianmcc 12y ago
    Is the term not about getting so close to real that it's that the remaining shortfall makes us uncomfortable? E.g. something "50% real" is so far off, we psychologically dismiss it as a cartoon, drawing, whatever. It's not trying to compete with real. Something "98% real" freaks us out though. Surprised I have not yet seen this link: http://blog.codinghorror.com/avoiding-the-uncanny-valley-of-user-interface/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/avoiding-the-uncanny-valley-of-...
- StavrosK 12y ago
  "Uuuugh I can't believe you missed the fucking turn, I've been warning you for TWO MINUTES, Jesus! Fine, I'll plot another course for your stupid ass!"
- ars 12y ago
  > I still don't understand how voice recognition (or more accurately, speech recognition) is currently in the uncanny valley. We are OK with stupid computers, we don't expect anything from them - we order them around is very formal language. But now there is an attempt to use natural language - and it doesn't work right. So it's actually better not to use natural language, and just stick to the formal language. That's where the valley part comes in.
VLM 12y ago
One important point about voice recognition is in the short term its OK if its slower and harder to use than superior technologies, as long as everyone knows it costs a lot of money. Once that fad aspect blows over, then usage plummets and its forgotten. See Kinect, or the nintendo power glove, or qr-codes, or google glass, or the cue cat, or a zillion other examples that are in, or now entering, 8-track-hood.
- eru 12y ago
  QR-codes have found some useful niches. Eg for setting up my phone as a second factor authentication device.
yehat 12y ago
The Uncanny Valley of HN comments gives plenty of credit to the author's post (which I enjoyed). Most of the comments sounds like coming from underdeveloped AI - awkward perception and total lack of human sense of humor.
shanselman 12y ago
Um. No.
51Cards 12y ago
"The Uncanny Valley is a term that originated from the computer animation industry. In 1992, while finishing A Bug’s Life, Pixar had to build a digital valley for..." Ummm.... Wikipedia: "The term was coined by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori as Bukimi no Tani Genshō in 1970. The hypothesis has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of the "uncanny" identified in a 1906 essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny"."
- crazygringo 12y ago
  If you read the rest of the paragraph, it's quite clear that the entire description is intentionally humorous nonsense. I mean, the third sentence had to make that clear... ;) > They ended up illustrating a crate of Campbell’s® Tomato Soup™ in the corner to make it feel a bit more canny.
  - scintill76 12y ago
    I have mixed feelings about misleading stealth jokes like this (I wouldn't want someone reading to "learn" that Pixar coined the term in 1992), but this one's pretty obvious and probably worth it for the laugh.
  - nicolethenerd 12y ago
    The missing word kind of broke the joke for me ("so he [can/could] get a vasectomy") - I got so hung up on wondering whether part of the sentence was missing or whether something had been lost in translation that I missed the fact that it was just an attempt at humor. Copy editing - it's important!
    - mtVessel 12y ago
      Agreed. Without that auxiliary verb, it was really hard to know the author was kidding about Buzz Lightyear getting a vasectomy in A Bug's Life.
zanny 12y ago
I'm still bummed that with all these companies implementing voice recognition there still is not anything close to a FOSS option. It is a major field and the kind of software that takes a huge amount of work to get right and I feel like in the future free operating systems are going to look archaic without it, but it does not seem like the kind of thing any small club of friends can pick up and build to match Google or Apple at. The same applies to OCR and other photo recognition techniques like faces or red eye. Tesseract is probably the largest free software OCR project but it still seems to do so much worse than proprietary Adobe and Microsoft products. At least the OCR reader that came with my S4 does a terrible job, though it might be using Tesseract behind the scenes since I think its the one from f-droid. Digikam does all right red eye correction but it does it with a layered filter rather than any recognition of eyes. It also sometimes can find faces, but not nearly as accurately as Google can. All these fuzzy logic fields are things that take huge code bases and a lot of R&D to get right and nobody in the free software movement has the organization or just the raw bank to make them happen from what I can see. Red Hat surely is not investing in them (kind of outside their enterprise / server domain) and they are about the only company prominent and powerful enough to do it.
- modeless 12y ago
  > it does not seem like the kind of thing any small club of friends can pick up and build to match Google or Apple at Actually I think it's not out of the question now. The recent advances in recognition accuracy are mostly due to deep neural nets. The research is all published open access, and the cutting-edge tools are mostly open source (Theano, Torch, Caffe). Training neural nets is actually a lot simpler than the old methods of doing speech recognition; I think it's much more accessible to a small team. The only really difficult requirement is lots and lots of clean labeled data for training.
  - woodson 12y ago
    I don't really see how the "old" methods were really less accessible. There were tools such as HTK, cmu sphinx, etc., or srilm for language modelling, each with documentation and a large user base. Granted, a lot of fiddling is involved if one wants to use speaker adaptative training (MLLR, VTLN), feature transforms (HLDA, MLLT), MLP features (TANDEM), etc., but DNN approaches come with their own set of screws to tweak.. It's just hard to make something work really well for a specific use case; when contributors to an open-source project are all trying to scratch their own itch (make it work for their specific use [language, vocabulary, etc.]), the result may not be universally satisfying.
alttab 12y ago
The truly best voice recognition pretty much has to be hooked up to an uber-AI. Gaining a friend, yes. Imagine if they could program things into it that would make your overall life better by slightly altering your behavior? For instance, if you asked "Siri" to remind you every 40 minutes for a ciggarette break, I can imagine her slowly weaning you off, etc.
b6 12y ago
I apologize, I'm pretty sure I feel the way I do because I'm getting old, but here's how I feel: talking to computers is a really, really bad interface, so I don't do it. One reason it's bad is that the sounds we make are mush. It's a miracle if a computer system can correctly retrieve the words from an utterance. Another reason it's bad is that the words we say are nonsense. Our sentences aren't parseable, they don't conform to any actual grammar. So I see it as another example of people selling something that's supposed to be more convenient than what we already have, but for many reasons, it probably isn't. One day it may be, but it wouldn't be surprising for people to be selling it as more convenient for many years before it actually is. I'm not criticizing the technology -- it's amazing. It's just clear to me that it isn't ready to be invited into my life. I consider it inevitable that we will eventually lose control of technology, but we can at least try to be judicious.
- pesenti 12y ago
  Yes you are getting old. Just observe a kid using an ipad and you'll understand how useful it can be. My 5 year old is able to find pretty much anything she wants (like videos of play doh of frozen characters) through voice search.
- dnautics 12y ago
  I disagree. It's great, I Drive lyft professionally and it is very useful to be able to use the phone without removing it from its holster between ride. Also, I just dictated that entire paragraph while sitting in a noisy Korean restaurants
- peterwwillis 12y ago
  Well current voice recognition tech makes it a crappy user interface, but it could be improved. It does make a really handy feedback device, though. Much like haptic feedback, humans can detect a wide range of audio cues and use that as feedback in an interface. You probably already recognize the bip on your phone is a Facebook message while the bong is your e-mail alert, and the ding your text message. Back in the day when I made my own CarPC, I naturally made my own interface for it too, for, you know... reasons. The input was a mini numpad, but the output was audio - primarily text to speech. I could drive around and use the interface (mostly) safely, but be exactly sure of my input choices using the one-handed, nailed-down keypad. Worked like a charm. If in the future we nail down the voice input to be more accurate, fast and flexible, we can avoid the author's concerns and get something as useful as touch screens but based on our ears and mouths.
wodenokoto 12y ago
Uncanny valley did not originate in the computer animation industry. It originated in robotics, and was coined by Masahiro Mori in 1970. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiro_Mori http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiro_Mori
sukilot 12y ago
I think Zach was drunk on this one. Also, "eat a dick", really?

75 points by hodgesmr 12y ago

"Voice recognition" sounds more reminiscent of speaker identification than speech recognition to me. Although I don't work on that myself, my day job is in a related field, and even IBM's "speech to text" is a term I never hear being used (unlike for instance "text to speech"). People around me either say "speech recognition" or "ASR" (for automatic speech recognition). I'd be interested to learn, though, if / where alternative terms are in more wide-spread use.

woodson 12y ago
I agree. I find the use of the term odd and it is not commonly used in an academic context; however, I think I recall having seen it being used informally in the context of voice commands (i.e., controlling a PC or appliance) or, more generally, voice user interfaces.

anatari 12y ago

Voice recognition is not in an uncanny valley. Uncanny valley means there is a point where something that is less real is better than something that is more real. Pixar improves the scene by adding elements that are unrealistic. Another example is a preference for lower frame rate movies. Right now, every incremental improvement to voice recognition improves its usefulness. It might appear that we're in an uncanny valley because voice recognition is barely usable right now versus completely unusable in the past, but there is no one that prefers worst voice recognition over better voice recognition.

amelius 12y ago
> The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of aesthetics which holds that when features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some observers. The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of beings as subjects move toward a healthy, natural likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability. Wording by wikipedia. So apparently, there might be points on the graph where a slight increase in recognition performance actually freaks out some users.
saraid216 12y ago
> but there is no one that prefers worst voice recognition over better voice recognition. Siri versus XBox in his post? Maybe you're using different metrics for what's better or worse.
modeless 12y ago
Of course nobody prefers less accurate transcription, but we're talking about more than transcription here. It's entirely reasonable to prefer a "command line" style interface like the XBox over a "conversational" style interface like Siri for the reason that the "conversational" style interface is less reliable even though it's in some sense more "real".
sumitviii 12y ago
I think the OP referred to Uncanny valley for the graph. Think of that graph as the utility derived from voice recognition.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
matthew-wegner 12y ago
I think there is a real danger that people are modifying/learning how to speak to computer voice recognition software. If voice recognition can't quickly become able to parse natural language, it will inevitably have to parse "I'm talking a dumb computer" cadence and inflection instead. Incremental improvements are very bad in this regard. These things are hard to reverse, too (people still speak with a very distinct "I'm speaking on a telephone" cadence today).
- woodson 12y ago
  IMHO, people (and hence language) will always adapt in certain ways to get the message across. People already learned how to "google" and expect the same style of search queries to be effective elsewhere. When speaking on the telephone, people tend to slightly change their voice to counteract the channel noise (with acoustic consequences such as increased fundamental frequency ["pitch"], etc.). I would be surprised if a similar adaptation didn't happen for human-computer voice interaction, which would ultimately help making it work well enough to be useful. (Of course, using speech recognition to transcribe human-to-human interaction will still be barely usable..)
jimmaswell 12y ago
In text adventures there was a limited grammar that the parser understood that was English-like, which you had to express your actions in: get lamp, put lamp on table, eat fish, look sword. This is easier than if the parser tried to let you use fancy English sentences that it'd probably get wrong often and that you would make more mistakes in because the line is blurred between what you're allowed to say or not. That would be a point between the simplistic text adventure grammar and perfect natural language parsing, with the simpler grammar being preferable. I can see the same being true for voice commands.
- lsaferite 12y ago
  As a side note, it might be funny to hook one of these voice command systems up to a z-machine VM. The command set is very limited as you pointed out, so it should easily be able to handle the input side. And the voices, while still robotic, seem pretty good as well. With games like Zork being fully text based you could easily turn it into a conversational game.

idbehold 12y ago

> The Uncanny Valley is a term that originated from the computer animation industry. Uhh, I don't think so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley#Etymology

soylentcola 12y ago
In fairness, this is followed up with: > In 1992, while finishing A Bug’s Life, Pixar had to build a digital valley for Buzz Lightyear to drive his Ford® F-150™ pickup through on the way to the hospital so he get a vasectomy. So I'm pretty sure the author is being deliberately silly.
- zik 12y ago
  Just not actually funny.

tashoecraft 12y ago

I'd really like it if someone condensed that article and removed all attempts to be funny or sound extremely clever.

holman 12y ago
I'll give it a shot: > Buzz Lightyear walks into a bar called the "Uncanny Valley" and asks the bartender for a vodka soda. The bartender gives him a vasectomy. Voice recognition is important!
smlacy 12y ago
"Siri's voice recognition is kind of bad some of the time. I've extrapolated this observation to all other voice recognition systems"
- StavrosK 12y ago
  I have been extremely impressed by Google's voice recognition. It got things right that I never thought it would, such as homophones or proper names.
  - gok 12y ago
    I don't mean to belittle you or Google's speech team, but neither homophones nor proper names are considered hard problems in modern automatic speech recognition.
    - StavrosK 12y ago
      I don't remember the case exactly, but it was something that was hard to resolve, at least it seemed so to me.
than 12y ago
Robots don't have a sense of humor. And the article is about how voice recognition is just in its infancy.
12y ago

Jgrubb 12y ago

This post reads like he's experimenting with the Uncanny Valley of Auto-generated Blogging.

aaronpk 12y ago

Is it just me or is the author using the term "Uncanny Valley" completely wrong? Ignoring the silly Pixar story, I still don't understand how voice recognition (or more accurately, speech recognition) is currently in the uncanny valley. You know when your GPS says "recalculating" in a condescending voice? That's the uncanny valley of text-to-speech.

recursive 12y ago
I'm no valley expert, but it seems to me that uncanny valley refers to an artificial system intended to mimic a natural one. It mostly gets the mimicry right, but not enough that we are completely fooled. This freaks some people out. Siri's UI intends to mimic a person that understands what you are saying. In practice, it gets it wrong in hilarious and frustrating ways, breaking the illusion. So "uncanny valley" seems ok to me.
- brianmcc 12y ago
  Is the term not about getting so close to real that it's that the remaining shortfall makes us uncomfortable? E.g. something "50% real" is so far off, we psychologically dismiss it as a cartoon, drawing, whatever. It's not trying to compete with real. Something "98% real" freaks us out though. Surprised I have not yet seen this link: http://blog.codinghorror.com/avoiding-the-uncanny-valley-of-user-interface/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/avoiding-the-uncanny-valley-of-...
StavrosK 12y ago
"Uuuugh I can't believe you missed the fucking turn, I've been warning you for TWO MINUTES, Jesus! Fine, I'll plot another course for your stupid ass!"
ars 12y ago
> I still don't understand how voice recognition (or more accurately, speech recognition) is currently in the uncanny valley. We are OK with stupid computers, we don't expect anything from them - we order them around is very formal language. But now there is an attempt to use natural language - and it doesn't work right. So it's actually better not to use natural language, and just stick to the formal language. That's where the valley part comes in.

VLM 12y ago

One important point about voice recognition is in the short term its OK if its slower and harder to use than superior technologies, as long as everyone knows it costs a lot of money. Once that fad aspect blows over, then usage plummets and its forgotten. See Kinect, or the nintendo power glove, or qr-codes, or google glass, or the cue cat, or a zillion other examples that are in, or now entering, 8-track-hood.

eru 12y ago
QR-codes have found some useful niches. Eg for setting up my phone as a second factor authentication device.

yehat 12y ago

The Uncanny Valley of HN comments gives plenty of credit to the author's post (which I enjoyed). Most of the comments sounds like coming from underdeveloped AI - awkward perception and total lack of human sense of humor.

shanselman 12y ago

Um. No.

51Cards 12y ago

"The Uncanny Valley is a term that originated from the computer animation industry. In 1992, while finishing A Bug’s Life, Pixar had to build a digital valley for..." Ummm.... Wikipedia: "The term was coined by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori as Bukimi no Tani Genshō in 1970. The hypothesis has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of the "uncanny" identified in a 1906 essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny"."

crazygringo 12y ago
If you read the rest of the paragraph, it's quite clear that the entire description is intentionally humorous nonsense. I mean, the third sentence had to make that clear... ;) > They ended up illustrating a crate of Campbell’s® Tomato Soup™ in the corner to make it feel a bit more canny.
- scintill76 12y ago
  I have mixed feelings about misleading stealth jokes like this (I wouldn't want someone reading to "learn" that Pixar coined the term in 1992), but this one's pretty obvious and probably worth it for the laugh.
- nicolethenerd 12y ago
  The missing word kind of broke the joke for me ("so he [can/could] get a vasectomy") - I got so hung up on wondering whether part of the sentence was missing or whether something had been lost in translation that I missed the fact that it was just an attempt at humor. Copy editing - it's important!
  - mtVessel 12y ago
    Agreed. Without that auxiliary verb, it was really hard to know the author was kidding about Buzz Lightyear getting a vasectomy in A Bug's Life.

zanny 12y ago

I'm still bummed that with all these companies implementing voice recognition there still is not anything close to a FOSS option. It is a major field and the kind of software that takes a huge amount of work to get right and I feel like in the future free operating systems are going to look archaic without it, but it does not seem like the kind of thing any small club of friends can pick up and build to match Google or Apple at. The same applies to OCR and other photo recognition techniques like faces or red eye. Tesseract is probably the largest free software OCR project but it still seems to do so much worse than proprietary Adobe and Microsoft products. At least the OCR reader that came with my S4 does a terrible job, though it might be using Tesseract behind the scenes since I think its the one from f-droid. Digikam does all right red eye correction but it does it with a layered filter rather than any recognition of eyes. It also sometimes can find faces, but not nearly as accurately as Google can. All these fuzzy logic fields are things that take huge code bases and a lot of R&D to get right and nobody in the free software movement has the organization or just the raw bank to make them happen from what I can see. Red Hat surely is not investing in them (kind of outside their enterprise / server domain) and they are about the only company prominent and powerful enough to do it.

modeless 12y ago
> it does not seem like the kind of thing any small club of friends can pick up and build to match Google or Apple at Actually I think it's not out of the question now. The recent advances in recognition accuracy are mostly due to deep neural nets. The research is all published open access, and the cutting-edge tools are mostly open source (Theano, Torch, Caffe). Training neural nets is actually a lot simpler than the old methods of doing speech recognition; I think it's much more accessible to a small team. The only really difficult requirement is lots and lots of clean labeled data for training.
- woodson 12y ago
  I don't really see how the "old" methods were really less accessible. There were tools such as HTK, cmu sphinx, etc., or srilm for language modelling, each with documentation and a large user base. Granted, a lot of fiddling is involved if one wants to use speaker adaptative training (MLLR, VTLN), feature transforms (HLDA, MLLT), MLP features (TANDEM), etc., but DNN approaches come with their own set of screws to tweak.. It's just hard to make something work really well for a specific use case; when contributors to an open-source project are all trying to scratch their own itch (make it work for their specific use [language, vocabulary, etc.]), the result may not be universally satisfying.

alttab 12y ago

The truly best voice recognition pretty much has to be hooked up to an uber-AI. Gaining a friend, yes. Imagine if they could program things into it that would make your overall life better by slightly altering your behavior? For instance, if you asked "Siri" to remind you every 40 minutes for a ciggarette break, I can imagine her slowly weaning you off, etc.

b6 12y ago

I apologize, I'm pretty sure I feel the way I do because I'm getting old, but here's how I feel: talking to computers is a really, really bad interface, so I don't do it. One reason it's bad is that the sounds we make are mush. It's a miracle if a computer system can correctly retrieve the words from an utterance. Another reason it's bad is that the words we say are nonsense. Our sentences aren't parseable, they don't conform to any actual grammar. So I see it as another example of people selling something that's supposed to be more convenient than what we already have, but for many reasons, it probably isn't. One day it may be, but it wouldn't be surprising for people to be selling it as more convenient for many years before it actually is. I'm not criticizing the technology -- it's amazing. It's just clear to me that it isn't ready to be invited into my life. I consider it inevitable that we will eventually lose control of technology, but we can at least try to be judicious.

pesenti 12y ago
Yes you are getting old. Just observe a kid using an ipad and you'll understand how useful it can be. My 5 year old is able to find pretty much anything she wants (like videos of play doh of frozen characters) through voice search.
dnautics 12y ago
I disagree. It's great, I Drive lyft professionally and it is very useful to be able to use the phone without removing it from its holster between ride. Also, I just dictated that entire paragraph while sitting in a noisy Korean restaurants
peterwwillis 12y ago
Well current voice recognition tech makes it a crappy user interface, but it could be improved. It does make a really handy feedback device, though. Much like haptic feedback, humans can detect a wide range of audio cues and use that as feedback in an interface. You probably already recognize the bip on your phone is a Facebook message while the bong is your e-mail alert, and the ding your text message. Back in the day when I made my own CarPC, I naturally made my own interface for it too, for, you know... reasons. The input was a mini numpad, but the output was audio - primarily text to speech. I could drive around and use the interface (mostly) safely, but be exactly sure of my input choices using the one-handed, nailed-down keypad. Worked like a charm. If in the future we nail down the voice input to be more accurate, fast and flexible, we can avoid the author's concerns and get something as useful as touch screens but based on our ears and mouths.

wodenokoto 12y ago

Uncanny valley did not originate in the computer animation industry. It originated in robotics, and was coined by Masahiro Mori in 1970. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiro_Mori http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiro_Mori

sukilot 12y ago

I think Zach was drunk on this one. Also, "eat a dick", really?