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Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

Hate people typing on noisy mechanical keyboards? You're going to love everyone babbling into their devices all the time.

I really don't want to talk to my computer/phone/coffee pot/house. I would rather that software have its normal interface polished and made closer to something that is usable, than have another UI paradigm bolted on that is going to be badly implemented 80% of the time by application developers.

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To add on to that most of the voice enabled apps have trouble even recognizing speech when it comes to different dialects of English. For example, Southern dialect, "I am fixing to go to the bar, are you ready" would translate to "I am fixing the bar are you there yet?".

Plenty of technology exists for adaptation to speaker and/or dialect, it's just not considered particularly sexy. To phrase it in economic terms, you can spend your time doing algorithmic work to improve recognition slightly for your existing English users, or you could just deploy a new system for the 70 million or so affluent, tech-literate South Koreans or the maybe a half a billion or so upwardly mobile Hindi/Urdu speakers.

But, give it a little time and you can expect that authenticated users will be getting speaker adaptation.

With a throat mike, you could theoretically talk to your computer at a volume someone next to you could not hear.

I think voice interaction is inevitable - we can simply transfer information faster via vocal interactions than we can the keyboard or mouse (save for a few very fast typists or stenographers).

Ten years ago, DARPA was working on a sensor that could detect non-acoustic speech under their Advanced Speech Encoding project. Doesn't seem to have had any (publicly available) results, though.

This has been commercialized. I'm not sure if it's based on the same research, but you can find it here: www.theaudeo.com (site currently down, but it was up a couple of weeks ago).

Found it on the Web Archive[1], sounds like the same kind of mechanism, yeah.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150330030801/http://www.theaud...

Not me, I want Jarvis. I've been waiting 4 decades for it. I grew up watching Star Trek. I want the future that I was promised.

I want Jarvis.

"We were promised Jarvis, but all we got were eight different closed-source, non-extensible, hosted voice recognition platforms."

What are the leading voice recognition assistant thingies? Siri, Google Now (no human name, much like most google employees), Cortana, Alexis? They each have huge acoustic models and run completely privately and are completely closed source.

We can't have Jarvis until we run our own hackable computing infrastructures personally, not globally hosted versions running behind the walls of Trust Us, Inc.

Which mobile platform will be the first to offer pluggable voice-to-action backends? Much like we pick web browsers, we should be able to select our voice command interfaces, but that would require a lot more interop between hardware manufactures and would also kill their moats of unlimited training data acquisition.

Once it becomes a solved problem then someone can write the gnu or open source version. I thought that was obvious? There's already an open source project.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Sphinx

The others are leading because they are putting more time and money into their respective projects.

Solved "problem" with a petabyte of training data and 18,000 GPUs to train the model. :-\

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