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Comment by funkymike | Hacker News Reader

Recognizing the words is just the first step. Getting meaning out of those words is what really counts. When on a telephone call I may miss a percentage of what was said, due to poor audio quality, the speaker's accent, etc., but based on context I can still understand the message the speaker is trying to convey most of the time. Transcribing each word with near-perfect accuracy is unnecessary if the layers above that can handle it.

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That's true, but I wonder if computers will exceed out technical accuracy first, or begin to actually "understand" things first? I suspect the former.

They don't need to actually understand - whatever that means - they can apply statistical models based on phonetic distances and large corpora of dialogue.

Has that worked so far?

Google voice search will make several guesses as to what I said. It will sometimes enter a nonsensical, but similar sounding phrase to what I intended into the text box, but will then figure out that it's first guess is nonsense and return the correct search result.

So just based on observation I would say it works pretty good. On mobile I almost always use voice search, and unless I'm searching for an italian name or something weird it almost always hears me correctly. Even in a noisy pub.

That's a good point, I've rarely had issues with Google voice searching.

Of course it has. We went down from 40% to 6.9% error rate in 26 years. It may take a couple of decades to get to 0.1%.

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