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Comment by SMrF | Hacker News Reader

The documentary mentioned that Watson does some speech recognition. It attempts to listen to the competitor's answers so that it doesn't give a wrong answer that was already given.

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No, it is fed the correct answer by text once the question is completed. They said "listen" in the documentary, but later, in passing, specified what they meant by that. In particular, the demonstrated the active learning when Watson failed to understand a category required dates as answers. After 4 it learned that dates were the type of answer required and got the last question correct. Again, the feeding of the correct answers was happening after the question completed and via text, not speech.

So what translates the speech to text? I guess I just assumed they used software but perhaps there is a human doing this. I probably just missed when they mentioned this.

The correct answers are already known. Watson presumably gets the same answer the host has in front of him.

Someone would have to transcribe what the other contestants are saying only if Watson would also get their incorrect answers which doesn’t seem to be the case.

You're talking about two different things -- SMrF is saying that if Jennings or Rutter gives an incorrect answer, Watson is able to run speech recognition on what they said, ruling out the answer they gave. This would happen before the question is completed.

This is not true, apparently. Watson gave the same answer as another contestant (Ken).

Assuming the speech recognition software didn't simply fail, and that it in fact, does not exist.

The contestant said "20s", IBM Watson said "1920's" - both were wrong but one can see how Watson didn't recognise that the answer was the same, it wasn't.

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