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SpinVox "Recognition" Is Often Expensive Human Transcription
An anonymous reader writes "SpinVox offers to convert voice messages to text using a system called D2 or 'the Brain.' According to BBC News, said 'Brain' is often of the old-fashioned kind: SpinVox is sending private voice messages to South Africa, the Philippines, and maybe Egypt to be typed by people in a call centre, despite being registered as keeping all private data inside Europe and claiming that the text is somehow anonymised. Insiders say they transcribed 'love messages, secret messages' and everything else from beginning to end, and the company is being bled dry by the cost: SpinVox has been locked out of one of their data centers over a payment dispute. SpinVox refuses to comment further on details — but according to their web page, they're 'enabling the Speech 3.0, Voice 3.0, and Business 3.0 markets,' whatever that means."
Best algorithm, ever.
Now with 20% more vowels!
We're not even done with Bubble 2.0 yet!
Seriously. If their target market is English speakers and the people doing the translating don't speak English as their primary language... dude. Seriously. Nevermind the privacy issues here...
That's awful.
By the way I'm releasing a new text-to-speech service; the algorithm makes for a very smooth speech. It does however have a little bit of an accent.
What?
No.
Their service says that they keep user supplied data in house. They do not.
Their service says that they use advanced technological means to do the transcription. They do not.
How on earth do you take that to mean 'their service does what it says'?
You are wrong.
But it also knows what it doesn't know and is able to call on human experts for assistance.
http://www.spinvox.com/how_it_works.html
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Regardless of their lying about it, the actual 'method' itself is technically sound.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
From their PDF:
Speech 3.0: Fully-hosted, commercial strength SLAs, proven scale and reliability - no CapEx. Scales on demand to 150m capacity
So Speech 3.0 provides 150 meters of service-level agreements with no experience-point cap.
Voice 3.0: Superior and proven range of voice products. We repeatedly deliver great, mass-market experiences with our expertise in marketing and management of all lifecycle stages.
Voice 3.0 takes you from larva, through pupa, all the way to butterfly, and then you die and get eaten.
Business 3.0: Mature yet flexible business models - designed to adapt to the dynamics of service brands we partner with, from on-demand to full lifecycle revenue strategies
Business 3.0 is apparently a flexible business model where they interact with their partners. So that's new I guess, no one has thought of that yet. It's also where people who write marketing buzzwords go to die.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Spinvox has a denial here, claiming this is a case of disgruntled employees spreading falsehoods.
Of course one'd expect them to deny it, but they've just upped the stakes. They would be in violation of UK privacy laws *and* lying through their teeth if this denial is false.
Go somewhere random
>>>Human brains remain the only high performance computer manufactured with unskilled labour.
I object! It takes a lot of skill to satisfy today's demanding women. And what happens if you lack that skill? They'll just jump ship to some other guy's bed. Unskilled labor indeed. It takes a lot of skill to convince Miss Prissy to let her guard down, bribe her with a 50,000 dollar wedding, remove the diaphragm, and let you impregnate her.
No I'm not bitter.
Although I do have this gnawing pain in my gut until I can taste the bile rising up my throat and into my mouth. Well. Maybe I'm a little bitter. Or else I just have heartburn; anybody have a TicTac?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That's nothing, I just bought an application that converts my speech to text. Read that back to me. I said, read that back to me. God damn it, what the hell is wrong with this thing. Stupid blinking light, what the hell is that supposed to mean? This is... oh here we go. No, don't send
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One of my first jobs was for a company that scanned medical records and had computers read the text. Or, at least, that was how they advertised it. Actually it was me and about 100 other people reading the medical records and typing them in...
Okay, humans never screw up their speeck recognition, but that doesn't guarantee that the speeck is correctly transcribed.
Human transcription performed on industrial scale by non-native speakers is nothing new. For example, medical imaging texts are typed up by Cheap Foreign Labour from voice messages recorded by doctors. ;)
So remember this next time you read the analysis of your expensive MRI test.
every problem looks like a nail.
When all you have is six billion, renewable fueled, autonomous, self replicating, self housing, self programing, hundred billion node neural networks...
who the fuck needs an AI for voice recognition?
Losing your job to Bender: technological progress.
Losing your job to Apu: outrage.
But really, what's the difference? A service is a service. It's all progress .. sort of.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
A brain comes from moron woman even if it has the IQ of a contraceptive sponge.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Where are we as a species, if making babies is a fetish?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
And now you're saying that people who barely speak or understand English, let alone the subtlties of the language, being paid to transcribe English, is 'technically sound' and 'the best way to do it'? ...
Frankly, I'm not sure anymore if you're serious, or just being sarcastic.
Next you'll probably tell me "Oh, see that motherboard made of flammable wood? Regardless of it's flammability, it's the best flame-proof way to make a motherboard."
Sadly, it is. Many schools, even in third world and fourth world nations, teach English as their second language for people to participate in business with other groups, even other cultures within their same nations. English _is_ the trade language for this era. And compared to the absolute nonsensical debris most speech algorithms generate in poor acoustic environments, human brains designed by evolution and by education to tease speech out of background environments remain the best speech recognition tool.
And now you're saying that people who barely speak or understand English, let alone the subtlties of the language, being paid to transcribe English, is 'technically sound' and 'the best way to do it'? ...
I think it's more likely that these people speak better, more grammatically correct English than the average Brit or American.
I find it likely that the majority of these people who worked in these centers are young, recent college/university graduates who are doing this because they couldn't find another well paying job. This isn't a bunch of Angolans or Indonesians. We're talking about South Africans and Filipinos. The well educated South African and Filipino speaks, reads and writes excellent English.
For that matter, the same is probably true of Egyptians. Though I can't say that with any certainty because I don't know too many Egyptians.
The real problem is that people have lost their heads in the United States. The return of evangelicals has led to an atmosphere that is literally opposed to science. So, you get exactly what you expect. Opinions that are based on anecdote and wish thinking instead of data. The reason science works is because you start with the assumption that you don't know something until you can prove that you probably know it, with repeatable, verifiable results. When you start trusting the word of pill junkies and homophobic college dropouts versus the entire scientific community and their reams of data, get ready for some wide-reaching and catastrophic fuckups.
Canada kept the rules. The Canadian banking system is still the most sound. Every time we take cops off the financial beat, we end up with a banking crisis. These realities can be arrived at by simply reading about the last 30 years of panics, and the hundred years of bank panics that existed before the FDIC and sensible Great Depression legislation.
But leave it to the same fuckers from Harvard, who apparently can't even manage a college trust without running it into the ground.
The pro-market propaganda will continue, and probably destroy our economy beyond repair. And then some wise ass will say that it shows that the market does work, by wiping itself out.
Humans look at every message, not some. The patent explains this quite clearly: http://www.ipexl.com/patents/en/USPTOApps/Spinvox_Limited/Doulton_Daniel_Michael/20090170478.html
They're not native English-speakers. They are learning thousands of new words every week.
There was an official response to those accusations : http://blog.spinvox.com/ It's quite interesting.
From a purely evolutionary point of view? We're quite sane, if you ask me. If the idea of impregnating your woman gives you a boner, I'd say it's about as close to the original idea behind sex as it can be.
Don't tell anyone but, hey, getting her pregnant was the idea behind fucking. I know, it kinda changed in the meantime, but originally, that was the plan.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Uhh... Somehow I got confused about who said what - disregard above post or mod it down into obscurity where it belongs...
I think it's more likely that these people speak better, more grammatically correct English than the average Brit or American.
Since when has the average person spoken grammatically correct British/American English? What about slang, regional vocabulary, accents?
I think it'd be hard for a native speaker to translate in a lot of cases e.g. north/south in the UK.