Hacker News Reader

Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

> computational costs alone of doing NLP

The speech recognition part could run on a Pentium 133 in the nineties (Nuance software, Dragon naturally speaking), the Echo device has probably a more powerful CPU than that.

The NLP part could run on the device as well, it's mainly a storage problem, you need dozens of GB, at least 32GB sdcard.

Ideally only the search phrases would be sent to Google/Amazon/etc. That's also how Bill Gates vision was described in his 1995 book The Road Ahead. A personal agent in a wallet PC would surf the information super highway for you. ...well we are "almost" there but with a different solution.

View on HN

And that software in that era ha to be painstakibgly trained for each individual voice.

Echo "just works", and is clearly doing it by punting to the cloud.

Only the wake word needs to be processed locally.

Which the iPhone has no problem with. “Hey Siri” works even when you have no Internet connection.

Having the data locally necessary to process the wake word is slightly more practical to havig the language corpus necessary to process all English language in hundreds of accents.

Speech recognition in the 90s was absolutely turd.

So true - I vividly recall my attempt to dictate "Dear Sir" that ended up appearing on the screen as "Down Server" no joke.

Speech recognition worked fine in the late 90s. You could optionally train it for 15min with your own voive to improve the results. The Nuance software was better back then than what shipped with Win Vista inbuilt by default in 2006 and later. The same Nuance software runs nowadays on servers to power Siri, Google Now, Cortana. And who in the right mind would think every user gets its on dedicated super-computer. In reality, cloud based speech recognition and NLP has the advantage of a central database to collect different voice samples (to train) and a multi Gigabyte central NLP database, etc. But you won't get more CPU cycles than what would be available on a modern smartphone or a Smart TV or (what would fit in) an Echo like device. An offline-available software assistant as kind of premium feature for people who care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com