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IBM Strives For 'Superhuman' Speech Tech
robyn217 writes "IBM unveiled new speech recognition technology today that can comprehend the nuances of spoken English, translate it on the fly, and even create on-the-fly subtitles for foreign-language television programs. One of the projects perpetually monitors Arabic television stations, dynamically transcribing and translating any words spoken into English subtitles. Videos can then be viewed via a web browser, with all transcriptions indexed and searchable."
As it has been the case for the past thirty years, the description of the prowesses of the system are still written in the conditional form: "...IBM technology can be used to control computers and devices..." rather than the active form: "is being used"...
Ben Shneiderman is the person who, in my opinion, articulates the best the limits of speech recognition.
One of my favorite phrases to explain this issue is: "You don't want to speak to a computer, because you can't speak and think at the same time". More precisely, speech utterance makes use of some modules in our brain which are required for planification too. Hence, you can't plan as well what to do next when you speak, which is a big hurdle in the type of intellectual activities one carries with a computer.
Sometimes you need rather a large context to disambiguate: is this sentence part of a discussion on shore-front management, or spoken language understanding?