Microsoft, Cortana, and C2P0 Speech Recognition on the Way
December 5, 2015
Microsoft’s speech recognition pros are confident that Star Wars-like speech recognition is a “few years” away. Sci fi becomes reality.
The article “The Long Quest for Technology That Understands Speech as Well as a Human” is an encomium to Microsoft. I recall that when I tested a Windows phone, the design allowed me to activate Cortana, the company’s answer to Siri, when I did not want to deal with speech recognition.
The write up ignores the fact that ambient noise, complex strings of sounds like “yankeelov,” of poor diction creates nonsense outputs. That’s okay. This is rah rahism at its finest.
The write up states:
instinctively, without thinking, and with the expectation that they will work for us.
“When machine learning works at its best, you really don’t see the effort. It’s just so natural. You see the result,” says Harry Shum, the executive vice president in charge of Microsoft’s Technology and Research group.
There you go. A collision of Microsoft’s perception and the reality of a hugely annoying implementation of speech recognition in the real world.
The article points out:
“In research in particular we can take a long-term approach,” Shum said. “Research is a marathon.”
Interesting because the graphic in the write up depicts a journey that has spanned 30 plus years. But, remember, “parity” with human understanding of another human is coming really soon.
Have the wizards at Microsoft tried ordering a pecan turtle blizzard with the senior citizens’ discount at the Dairy Queer in Prospect, Kentucky?
I can tell you that human to human communication does not work particularly well. “Parity” then means that human to machine communication won’t be very good either unless specific ambient conditions are met.
The hope is that data, machine learning, and deep neural networks will come to the rescue. These technical niches may deliver the pecan turtle blizzard with the senior citizen discount, but I think more than a few years will be needed.,
Microsoft points out that humans “want the whole thing.” Yeah, really? When a company touts parity between Microsoft technology and human speech, the perception is that Microsoft will deliver the pecan turtle Blizzard.
Reality leads to “Would you repeat that?” and “What discount is that?” and “How many Blizzards?” Those Kentucky accents are difficult for a person living in a hollow to figure out. Toss in an “order from your car” gizmo and you have many opportunities to drag out a simple order into a modern twist on Bottom’s verbal blundering in Midsummer Night’s Dream.
One benefit of this write up is that IBM Watson can recycle the content for its knowledge base. Now that’s a thought.
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2015
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NOT to be ‘that guy’ but shouldn’t it be C-3PO, not C2PO, in the post’s title?
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Microsoft, Cortana, and C2P0 Speech Recognition on the Way : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search