On: This Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition

[tashoecraft]

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

[holman → tashoecraft]

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 → tashoecraft]

"Siri's voice recognition is kind of bad some of the time. I've extrapolated this observation to all other voice recognition systems"

[stavros → smlacy]

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 → stavros]

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.

[stavros → gok]

I don't remember the case exactly, but it was something that was hard to resolve, at least it seemed so to me.

[pshc → tashoecraft]

"But if we can ever jump past this uncanny valley, that’s where we’ll basically build AI."

To me this seemed like the main conclusion of the post.

And I agree. Voice recognition seems like an AI-complete problem. I think conversations will always be awkward and frustrating until Siri can construct a mental model of my habits, my particular turns of phrases and accent, what I'm up to right now, what I think is important, who else is in the room, etc. etc. I don't think you can (only) throw deep learning at the problem and expect anything but superficial responses. (Maybe if you had one neural net per user?)

[than → tashoecraft]

Robots don't have a sense of humor.

And the article is about how voice recognition is just in its infancy.