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Speech Recognition in Silicon
Ben Sullivan writes "NSF-funded researchers are working to develop a silicon-based approach to speech recognition. "The goal is to create a radically new and efficient silicon chip architecture that only does speech recognition, but does this 100 to 1,000 times more efficiently than a conventional computer." Good use of $1 million?"
My friend and I were talking about this. In countries that are more totalitarian, it could be used to root out "dangerous people" www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me.
100 to 1000 times more efficient worth $1M? meh. maybe.
100 to 1000 times more accurate worth $1M? definitely.
I'm curious to see if their research will improve Natural Language Queries, as opposed to just improving speech recognition. There is an important difference between having to say: SELECT name FROM users WHERE id=12345 and saying: Pull up the name of employee number 12345.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
I once did a lot of work with speech recognition software, having a former significant other who was disabled. I tested a number of programs, and found the biggest problem to be the wide variances in users' dialects. The programs all have to be trained initially to recognize a single users' voice. This means that a program trained for a Bostonian may not work for someone from Arkansas, Texas, or Louisiana. Also, the programs' effectiveness decreased over time if you did not use it regularly.
I don't know how possible it will be to make a program that can recognize all English users. Will someone who speaks Oxford English be recognized as well as a surfer from California? I doubt it.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
I work on product X and think of all the possibilities (list slightly feasible but most likely never going to happen features).
If this is really true what they're saying then people should put tons more money into product X!
Actually, use of speech recognition technology to index video clips for search engines _is_ both a very desirable technology, and something that can be done fairly easily (most professionally produced video, at least, takes great pains to have one speaker at a time and keep noise to a minimum). There's a fair bit of video content accessible via the web right now, and this will only increase (most new digital cameras can take video clips now - remember how quickly still pictures flooded the web when digicams first became available?).
Speech recognition technology has trouble when it's trying to sort out a noisy environment or a degraded communications channel, and has trouble holding useful open-ended conversations (as opposed to task-driven), but it's very capable in most other contexts. After all, the field has been under study for decades.
In summary, your mocking of the parent post is premature.
Every time a dollar value is placed on a piece of research, some idiot comes along and say "Hey! This could be spent providing clean drinking water, and food and shelter", as if only research that directly provides clean drinking water or food or shelter is worth funding. Quite frequently the idiot making this statement is in a perfect position to provide money to ensure that more people have access to these facilities, and just as frequently that idiot isn't doing so.
I'm sure that when America and Russia were engaged in the space race there were people saying "Hey! This money could be better spent on disaster relief!". And where are we now? Only a few short decades later we have sattelites that tell us where hurricanes are going so that we can evacuate areas and people who would otherwise die surviveWe have a global reliable telecommunications satellites so that disaster relief agencies in third world countries can inform people of what supplies are required, and people who would otherwse die survive.
Without the massive investment in jet airline technology that could otherwise have been spent "saving the starving", we would not be able to travel to disaster areas within hours of an incident. And so the list goes on.
If you personally want to see more money invested in agencies that provide disaster relief, or reliable shelter or clean water then you only have to donate to the right charities, and encourage others to do the same. It doesn't take many people to donate out of their pockets to provide $1 million. You can start here.
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.
making quantum leaps in speech recognition has tremendous potential for deaf and hard-of-hearing (I am the latter)
Imagine being in a meeting (almost always a problem for hearing impaired people) and having real-time subtitles.
$1 million is a TINY price considering upwards of 20% of the nation has some hearing loss and hearing aids cost on the order of $4000 a pair.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.