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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?"
If this really is true what they're saying, and knowing how much money is invested in speech recognition research on a yearl y basis, yeah, i would definately say that this is one million dollars of great investment...
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
Good use of $1 million?
Let me think for a moment... Hell yeah! If we had low power speech processors, the possibilities would be endless. For one, we'd finally have a Star Trek(TM) interface for our homes!
"Computer, lights!"
"Computer, make coffee!"
"Computer, Earl Grey, hot!"
As silly as it may sound, such an interface would be far more efficient than mashing buttons.
In addition, blind people could be significantly helped by this. Many of them already use speech recognition and synthesis to assist in computer usage. Imagine if their computers could suddenly understand them a thousand times better? They could talk to their computers a bit more naturally, thus saving their vocal chords from undue stress.
Other applications (off the top of my head) are:
- Voice notes on embedded devices (store only text!)
- Helpful Kiosks that can give you directions
- A new use for natural language database queries (i.e. Ask the computer what last quarter's net sales were.)
- Voice controlled robots ("You missed a corner, vacuum cleaner")
- Data search by voice ("Find me a channel that plays Star Trek")
Any other cool ideas out there?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I can just see the anonymous cowards shouting first post at their pcs now
Cruise TT
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 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.
Although $1million significantly can speed things up, this is a pretty ambitious undertaking.
My Master's research was on implementing machine learning in hardware, specifically support vector machines.
Now, they have much more money than I did, and probably this will be a collaboration involving many graduate students, but converting complex algorithms from software to hardware is no easy task.
It is just easier to do things in software, that's why it has evolved. The modular layers of abstraction allow a Computer Scientist working in machine learning or speech recognition to not have to worry about how the underlying hardware works.
Working in hardware, a lot these issues come face to face. Particularly since you want an architecture on a chip, whereas in a conventional desktop/server system there are resources such as lots of RAM, harddrive space, etc are available and their interconnections have been built and refined over decades.
Throw in concerns about small form factor, low power consumption, quite fast a lot of unexpected hurles pop up.
My master's research goal was to produce a data mining/machine learning machine, or at the very least a data mining/machine learning co-processor. In retrospect, that was a very ambitious goal that would require many years of work, probably in collaboration with other graduate students.
What I ended up doing was just Support Vector Machines in digital hardware. Now granted, there is another aspect to my research that I'm not mentioning here, mainly that I didn't use normal floating point mathematical architectures, but a different innovative logarithmic based mathematical architecture. That in itself was a significant undertaking.
In any case, this sounds like a great project, I just wonder how much they can do in their (in an academic sense) very small time frame of 2-3 years. Even though a lot of preliminary work has probably already been done just to apply for the grant.
In any case, it is great to see something like this, something to keep in mind in case I ever go back for a Ph.D.
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.