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Vista Speech Recognition Goes Awry
An anonymous reader writes "It seems even MSNBC is willing to take a jab on those rare occasions when Microsoft products don't work. During a demo of Vista's speech recognition technology, Vista couldn't differentiate between mom and aunt, and all attempts to rectify the problem just made it worse. Wait until you see what it spat out, I think we have a new 'All your base.' Don't you just love Microsoft's live demonstrations?"
Let's give this guy some credit. He clearly has some degree if competence if he's selected to showboat the app at a major presentation, at least enough to know that you need to train, or at least test, a voice recognition demo.
A far more likely scenario, in my mind, is that he trained and tested it 100 times and got it working nearly flawlessly, but in a different room and with a different setup. In fact he may have overtrained it. Programs like this can behave very badly when they end up overfitting the data.
On the day in question he may have had a different mic and the acoustics were certainly different and the program went whacko.
Footnote: Microsoft was a monopolistic, backwards company that started the PC revolution.
;-)
They don't deserve credit for starting the "PC revolution". The credit properly belongs to the hundreds of little startups and hobbyists, the whole CP/M crowd and others like Amiga. Microsoft was a subcontractor to a giant monopoly (IBM) that stepped in after the little guys demoed there was a market, and took over that market. They succeeded mostly because of a marketing budget greater than the budgets of all the little companies combined.
And there's a good argument that, by marketing PC/DOS rather than CP/M, they set back the PC revolution by 5 to 10 years, the time it took for PC/DOS to match the capabilities of CP/M when IBM started their PC marketing campaign.
Sorry; that's the way "the Market" works in the computer field. Small, independent developers make something new and start selling it; the big companies then step in and take over the market through traditional monopoly strategies.
It's likely that we're now going to hear people crediting Microsoft for starting the "voice recognition" revolution by inventing the new idea that computers can understand speech. Marketing can redefine history like that.
(Whereas we computer geeks know that Al Gore invented speech recognition.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I expect in 300+ years when Star Trek is set, our AI will beat the piss out of Star Trek AI. Hell, the computer has been around for only a little over 50 years. A little over 100 years ago we had just first discovered electricity and flight.
Well, maybe. But we invented microscopes around 300 years ago, and discovered microorganisms immediately thereafter. The understanding that some bacteria were involved in diseases followed quickly. But it was nearly 300 years before we successfully eradicated a disease (smallpox). Today, we're still battling new diseases, and we don't have anything like a general solution to all diseases. We have a few antibiotics that effect more than one disease, but we haven't made much progress in solving the problem of the development of resistance to our antibiotics. Hell, we can't even convince the general public that it's the evolutionary process at work here, and we've understood that for around 150 years.
I wouldn't predict any general solution to a complex problem like voice recognition in a mere 300 years. Maybe we will. But our history of general solutions to other complex biological problems is not encouraging. Neither is the history of our first 50 years of AI, despite the constant hype and Hollywood movies claiming that AI is just around the corner.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Is this "voice recognition" as in "understand English vocabulary and grammar rules and differentiate between speech and commands" or as in "match this sound up with one of 10 prerecorded ones to autodial a number"?
Try this:
Said: "How to recognize speech"
Understood: "How to wreck a nice beach"
No, it's not always easy to tell the difference...
"Good news, everyone!"