
Apple's Siri learns Shanghainese as voice assistants race to cover languages - JamilD
http://reuters.com/article/idUSKBN16G0H3
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JamilD
It's interesting how manual everything is, at least near the beginning:

> At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans
> to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then
> transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the
> spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at
> Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From
> there, a language model is built that tries to predict words sequences.

Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new
language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a
small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The
recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed
by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

