Very good explanation of the current state of the art in STT. I have also personally gone down this rabbit hole(especially the CTC bit) and agree 100% with what the author says. My personal viewpoints:

1. To have an ImageNet moment, we should have an ImageNet. LibriSpeech doesn't cut it. We should have an equivalent SpeechNet. Problem is visual language is one, while speech languages are many. So we should have an ImageNet for every language? And train for every language?

2. What is an ImageNet moment? Personally, though ImageNet has contributed a lot, similar to speech and NLP, even vision applications have promised more and delivered less in real world scenarios. And just like speech and NLP, only the big boys actually provide solutions in vision which shows in vision also they have access to better data which they don't share.