5 ms·

It's possible to do all this personalization without giving away your data to advertisers. Unfortunately Microsoft chose not to. Why do people seem to gloss ov

It's possible to do all this personalization without giving away your data to advertisers. Unfortunately Microsoft chose not to. Why do people seem to gloss over the fact that we can implement these technologies without losing privacy? e.g. voice recognition has been possible on home computers for decades now. You don't need the cloud for it.

andy_ppp 11y ago
1. Know everything about a person store it and mine it at scale. 2. ??? 3. Profit.
mynameisvlad 11y ago
I mean, you have to admit that desktop-based recognition is just not as good as cloud-based offerings. This is true across the board, having more data and power available will give better results.
- joosters 11y ago
  Sure, but desktop-based recognition has been improving all the time and may well be good enough. It still doesn't mean we have to lose our privacy just because a slightly better technology might be out there.
  - mynameisvlad 11y ago
    Not nearly as fast as cloud recognition has. Especially with all three of the big companies having serious cloud-based recognition offerings and focusing on them. And seriously, Cortana would be useless without the cloud aspect. Half the things it does revolve around connecting your digital life together by accessing various things about you. Without the cloud, it's literally just Windows 8 search.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > Not nearly as fast as cloud recognition has. How is that? Desktop systems respond quickly, cloud systems often respond after a second - it takes time for data to do a round-trip over crappy mobile connection. Mobile latency is a big thing. I agree wrt. Cortana (and Siri, Google Now) - most of the things you use them for will require Internet access. But there are still a lot of things that you could do with voice that shouldn't require a network connection, and we're missing the ability now. Not to mention you have zero customization options for cloud-based recognition. I could make good ol' MS Speech API recognize pretty much anything I wanted it to. No problem making it recognize a limited subset of two languages at the same time. With cloud-based systems, if the voice recognition doesn't like my accent, I'm out of luck.
      - mynameisvlad 11y ago
        I was referring to the improving part. joosters said desktop recognition has been improving, I meant that cloud has been improving faster. Which is true, all the big companies are focusing on cloud-based recognition. The improvements might eventually come to desktop recognition systems, but even that's not a guarantee given where the focus seems to be.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Fair enough. I didn't realize that you were just referring to that. And I agree with your assessment about relative speed of improvement.
pmelendez 11y ago
> Why do people seem to gloss over the fact that we can implement these technologies without losing privacy? e.g. voice recognition has been possible on home computers for decades now. You don't need the cloud for it. The experience is not quite the same. We have voice recognition since at least late 90's but you have to spend long hours training (> 20 hrs) in order to have a decent result (not even comparable). The fact that is cloud based now enable the software to fit better to different accents and pronounciations. Another thing is that personalization is not really possible in today devices if you want more than 3hrs battery.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I had better results in late 2000s with less than an hour of training MS Speech API than I have with Google Now today. Either off-line speech recognition isn't that bad or my English really sucks.
  - pmelendez 11y ago
    I don't know about Google Now. But Cortana does have way better results than local MS Speech API. My english does suck, so it is very impressive to me that Cortana got me right most of the time.
    - fencepost 11y ago
      Maybe I'm not using it right, but Cortana on my Lumia 640 Windows Phone seems to blow Google Now right out of the water in terms of capability and usability except for punctuation in voice recognition. On the other hand, generally I'm pretty impressed with just the voice recognition/transcription by Google on my Android phones (exception: "ferociously"). Transcriptions in Google Voice on the other hand are, hm, marginally good enough to often get a general gist of a call before I return it, but if I need the actual details of the message there's no choice but to listen to it. This includes calls made by me, from my phone that I also do voice recognition on, into a Google Voice number that I use for some tracking. It is interesting that the transcriptions in the web interface show how confident they are of the quality for each word by how dark the word is.

andy_ppp 11y ago

1. Know everything about a person store it and mine it at scale. 2. ??? 3. Profit.

mynameisvlad 11y ago

I mean, you have to admit that desktop-based recognition is just not as good as cloud-based offerings. This is true across the board, having more data and power available will give better results.

joosters 11y ago
Sure, but desktop-based recognition has been improving all the time and may well be good enough. It still doesn't mean we have to lose our privacy just because a slightly better technology might be out there.
- mynameisvlad 11y ago
  Not nearly as fast as cloud recognition has. Especially with all three of the big companies having serious cloud-based recognition offerings and focusing on them. And seriously, Cortana would be useless without the cloud aspect. Half the things it does revolve around connecting your digital life together by accessing various things about you. Without the cloud, it's literally just Windows 8 search.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > Not nearly as fast as cloud recognition has. How is that? Desktop systems respond quickly, cloud systems often respond after a second - it takes time for data to do a round-trip over crappy mobile connection. Mobile latency is a big thing. I agree wrt. Cortana (and Siri, Google Now) - most of the things you use them for will require Internet access. But there are still a lot of things that you could do with voice that shouldn't require a network connection, and we're missing the ability now. Not to mention you have zero customization options for cloud-based recognition. I could make good ol' MS Speech API recognize pretty much anything I wanted it to. No problem making it recognize a limited subset of two languages at the same time. With cloud-based systems, if the voice recognition doesn't like my accent, I'm out of luck.
    - mynameisvlad 11y ago
      I was referring to the improving part. joosters said desktop recognition has been improving, I meant that cloud has been improving faster. Which is true, all the big companies are focusing on cloud-based recognition. The improvements might eventually come to desktop recognition systems, but even that's not a guarantee given where the focus seems to be.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Fair enough. I didn't realize that you were just referring to that. And I agree with your assessment about relative speed of improvement.

pmelendez 11y ago

> Why do people seem to gloss over the fact that we can implement these technologies without losing privacy? e.g. voice recognition has been possible on home computers for decades now. You don't need the cloud for it. The experience is not quite the same. We have voice recognition since at least late 90's but you have to spend long hours training (> 20 hrs) in order to have a decent result (not even comparable). The fact that is cloud based now enable the software to fit better to different accents and pronounciations. Another thing is that personalization is not really possible in today devices if you want more than 3hrs battery.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I had better results in late 2000s with less than an hour of training MS Speech API than I have with Google Now today. Either off-line speech recognition isn't that bad or my English really sucks.
- pmelendez 11y ago
  I don't know about Google Now. But Cortana does have way better results than local MS Speech API. My english does suck, so it is very impressive to me that Cortana got me right most of the time.
  - fencepost 11y ago
    Maybe I'm not using it right, but Cortana on my Lumia 640 Windows Phone seems to blow Google Now right out of the water in terms of capability and usability except for punctuation in voice recognition. On the other hand, generally I'm pretty impressed with just the voice recognition/transcription by Google on my Android phones (exception: "ferociously"). Transcriptions in Google Voice on the other hand are, hm, marginally good enough to often get a general gist of a call before I return it, but if I need the actual details of the message there's no choice but to listen to it. This includes calls made by me, from my phone that I also do voice recognition on, into a Google Voice number that I use for some tracking. It is interesting that the transcriptions in the web interface show how confident they are of the quality for each word by how dark the word is.