Updates to Cloud Speech-to-Text and general availability of Cloud Text-to-Speech

Mozilla’s DeepSpeech is available as an offline pre-trained system for English.

The quality is far below Google’s speech API as the model is somewhat out of date and more importantly the training data set is much smaller and less general.

The best pretrained speech to text model I’ve seen is from Baidu’s DeepSpeech 2 repository. They provide pretrained models for English and Chinese based on their internal data. The quality is astonishingly good!

Edit: both of these models can be comfortably run in real-time on a desktop. At Arm I recently worked on a project to run <5% word error rate models in real-time on a mobile phone.

It is also extremely expensive ($1.44/hr of audio) which really limits its potential. I looked at it for a project but it just didn't make sense.

Not sure why it would be a worthwhile endeavor to roll up your own text to speech system when basically all major cloud providers give that service for a price, unless this cost would make a significant fraction of your total costs. Unless that's the case, why not use this service until the day comes when Google might raise prices and then we could decide what to do about it? It's still an API call, afterall.

While I agree that Google maps price increase was a bit much, I'm sure Google realizes they can't offer services to businesses and viably keep doing this kind of 180 too ofren, especially if they offer it as part of their Google cloud. So it's not very likely they will pull the rug under this service again.

Does Snips support existing MQTT broker yet? Haven't checked up on development since late 2017.

Hey I’ve been working on a chatbot project lately and I came across semantic parsing (http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/wcmac/sippycup/blob/maste...) . Even Though we didn’t use it , I found it to be more robust and capable to handle very complicated utterances. The main disadvantage of using a grammar based approach is that it’s hard to extend the grammar to incorporate new intents and also creating a grammar is time consuming .

But the approach used in various NLU services such as Snips and RASA is much more simpler. This can work fine for easy queries but once we start asking complicated questions using conjunctions and disjunctions these systems start becoming brittle. If they try to capture all the possible logical forms through intents they’ll need an exponential number of intents and also a huge dataset to capture all the intents.

I would like to know your take on using a grammar based semantic parsing.

pure guess: Mozilla will use their DeepSpeech model for that soon

Works for me. Whats your machine like?

It works very intermittently for me (Chrome on Windows, with plenty of RAM and CPU).

When I click the "speak" button, it makes a network request (as shown in the Chrome devtools) and immediately gets back a response that looks big enough to be an audio blob.

But most of the time, instead of actually playing the audio, it just sits there with a spinner for anywhere between 30 seconds and 5 minutes before giving up, with no errors in the console.

Google is orders of magnitudes better on trendy words and phrases etc. Just try Siri vs Google.

That's why all the hype about DL is so irritating. Yes, it allowed us to make enormous progress in certain fields. No, it's nowhere near usable in others. So why pretend it is?

Just one example from the preface to Chollet's "Deep Learning with Python":

> If you’ve picked up this book, you’re probably aware of the extraordinary progress that deep learning has represented for the field of artificial intelligence in the recent past. In a mere five years, we’ve gone from near-unusable image recognition and speech transcription, to superhuman performance on these tasks.

Come on, speech to text is still far from usable unless in a very limited scenarios. Why pretend it's different?

Dutch isn't yet a language that the new machine learning models are used for because there isn't enough dutch training data, nor enough people who speak dutch to make the engineering and compute investment worthwhile.

Just wait - it'll come in a few years though.