Ask HN: Speech recognition had got quite good on mobile. How?

5 pointsfuzztester3 comments

Not perfect, but good to the extent that I use it a fair amount on mobile to speed up my text input by using speech-to-text in WhatsApp, SMS, Gmail, etc. I voice-type and then edit to correct the errors.

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My guess, lots of user data + user corrections. When we correct what our phones mishear, that data helps train the speech recognition models to get more accurate over time.

I’m particularly impressed by speech recognition on Apple Watch. On device, via tiny microphones, in noisy environments, and still works despite my non-native accent.

It was interesting to me to learn that big companies deliberately train their speech recognition on different accents. Even for something like the "OK google" wake word, they have a feature for Japanese speakers who can say "Oke Googuru" because they don't have the same L/R sounds. https://www.wikihow.com/Say-Okay-Google-in-Japanese

And with my Indian and European coworkers, I always have to turn on subtitles in Zoom and Meet to be able to understand them. The computer does a way better job at this than I ever could!

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