Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Releases Open Source Speech Recognition Model, Massive Voice Dataset (mozilla.org)
Mozilla's VP of Technology Strategy, Sean White, writes:
I'm excited to announce the initial release of Mozilla's open source speech recognition model that has an accuracy approaching what humans can perceive when listening to the same recordings... There are only a few commercial quality speech recognition services available, dominated by a small number of large companies. This reduces user choice and available features for startups, researchers or even larger companies that want to speech-enable their products and services. This is why we started DeepSpeech as an open source project.
Together with a community of likeminded developers, companies and researchers, we have applied sophisticated machine learning techniques and a variety of innovations to build a speech-to-text engine that has a word error rate of just 6.5% on LibriSpeech's test-clean dataset. vIn our initial release today, we have included pre-built packages for Python, NodeJS and a command-line binary that developers can use right away to experiment with speech recognition.
The announcement also touts the release of nearly 400,000 recordings -- downloadable by anyone -- as the first offering from Project Common Voice, "the world's second largest publicly available voice dataset." It launched in July "to make it easy for people to donate their voices to a publicly available database, and in doing so build a voice dataset that everyone can use to train new voice-enabled applications." And while they've started with English-language recordings, "we are working hard to ensure that Common Voice will support voice donations in multiple languages beginning in the first half of 2018."
"We at Mozilla believe technology should be open and accessible to all, and that includes voice... As the web expands beyond the 2D page, into the myriad ways where we connect to the Internet through new means like VR, AR, Speech, and languages, we'll continue our mission to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all."
Together with a community of likeminded developers, companies and researchers, we have applied sophisticated machine learning techniques and a variety of innovations to build a speech-to-text engine that has a word error rate of just 6.5% on LibriSpeech's test-clean dataset. vIn our initial release today, we have included pre-built packages for Python, NodeJS and a command-line binary that developers can use right away to experiment with speech recognition.
The announcement also touts the release of nearly 400,000 recordings -- downloadable by anyone -- as the first offering from Project Common Voice, "the world's second largest publicly available voice dataset." It launched in July "to make it easy for people to donate their voices to a publicly available database, and in doing so build a voice dataset that everyone can use to train new voice-enabled applications." And while they've started with English-language recordings, "we are working hard to ensure that Common Voice will support voice donations in multiple languages beginning in the first half of 2018."
"We at Mozilla believe technology should be open and accessible to all, and that includes voice... As the web expands beyond the 2D page, into the myriad ways where we connect to the Internet through new means like VR, AR, Speech, and languages, we'll continue our mission to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all."
I had a problem with voice assistants because it was not being done inside my circle of trust (but closer to a sworn enemy).
If I can run this on my home server, it will completely change the game.
I could now actually implement Star-Trek-style home automation, if I needed it.
"Computer, switch mood to" evening'." (campfire color scheme lights, shutters down, adjust screen warmth, play some relaxing music, mix me some nice drink [I'm building a drink mixer] and connect me to a tight slut)
I guess with Firefox OS, Thunderbird, etc now dead and buried Mozilla needs something else to do instead of working on Firefox. I mean with all the time they've saved by transforming Firefox into Chrome those 1200 people need something to say that they're working on.
Is that site black or is it just some javascript bogosity? Who cares?
Disconnect Alexa, SIRI and Google from the network, and shut them down.
Huh? Their browser is fine â" what do you want improved in it? I would like to see an open source voice assistant run by non-profit organizations. Think of it as a browser feature. One way of improving the browser is voice control.
The vast majority of Mozilla's money is spent on Firefox.
You just made up "most of their money is spent on community projects" out of thin air, didn't you?
What kind of cheap hardware are you people running that you can't handle an application using 4 gigs of memory? Throw away that decade old shitbox and drive around on trash day and find something newer.
They really need to train it on this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Not sure how many people tested out the model yet. I did a few days ago. It wasn't so great. Your WAV file has to be in an exact format. Once you get past that, it wasn't able to understand the clip of audio I fed it at all. They have a lot of work to do. Sorry guys, I will be paying Google the 2 cents to do speech to text still.
Mozilla is fucking up lately. Firefox is more and more annoying.
eg. Why so many OK OK's to install an add-on? Why break old good ones? Why uncheck 5 boxes to get a blank new tab? All dick moves.
get fukt. I'll go portable old version on all of it pricks.
If - and I don't yet know if this is the case, they don't actually seem to say - this represents a stand-alone, does-not-go-to-the-LAN-or-WAN speech-to-text system... with an error rate of 6.5% on English speech as claimed... then it's way more important than Yet Another Web Browser.
This is precisely the kind of thing projects like Mycroft need to become not just another way to send your activity out on the net, which inherently decreases both reliability and security.
If indeed this is what this is, then the door opens for all manner of sophisticated home advances we can actually trust and depend on.
They claim around 1:1 [decode rate : normal speech rate] with a reasonably modern CPU/GPU. That needs considerable improvement. Reference quote from here:
That's a lot of computing power to hand off, particularly in a laptop. Using just the CPU, you'll be pegging it the whole time you're talking, and then some. For a decent desktop, it's at least doable, but it's still a very heavy compute load.
Though... saying "MacBook Pro" doesn't really tell us enough... I have a MacBook Pro that is a dual-core Intel machine... it's not what you'd call quick. There are a lot of different hardware configs that could be described by "MacBook Pro."
Seems like a pretty big deal to have to dedicate a server to the STT task (but then again, if I could get my STT tasks out from under the cloud... I'd probably do it. I have a spare 3 GHz 8-core hanging around, so...) but I think for general use, they have to do better. This isn't going to fly well on a Raspberry pi, for instance, it'll just get way behind.
Still. IMHO, this may be important. Very.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They have been neglecting the security aspect of their browser for 20+ years while continually throwing in new projects like this utilizing developers whose caliber of work would not qualify them for jobs in the professional sector.
20+ years? Really? Mozilla is only 19 years old. Firefox is only 15 years old.
Certainly this will be part of the browser.
Obviously, the Mozilla folks see that direct text input devices may not play a big role in our future, or indeed our present, and they don't want to use the Internet services of another browser maker (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon) to enable non-text on their browser. This would be slower than local recognition and not under their control. Or yours.
It's really easy to stifle innovation by requiring an over-tight focus. Many companies fail by doing just this.
Bruce Perens.
Thinks like this will make the browser better in the future! They have vision and want to be a leader in future tech solutions.
That future is not that far away, you have currently siri, alexa and friends growing up, you have mobile phones, where write is hard and speak is easier, you may have automatic voice translations, where the first step is of course, voice recognition.
When MS, Apple, Google release their browsers with build in screen reads, automatic translation and speech recognition, firefox also need something, then can not start researching and developing only after the other release it, that is a catch up game you can never win.
On the other hand, if you prepare solutions and fine-tune them, you can import then in the browser, some times even first than others. If they are first to market in developing a speech recognition w3c standard, they can block closed and patented solutions
Higuita
This is a HUGE issue: Firefox continually increases the CPU power and memory it uses, even when you aren't looking at a Firefox window. Why? What is Firefox doing? Bitcoin mining?
Why does Firefox use so much memory when there are only a few tabs open? Why does Firefox increase memory use when it is not being viewed?
Another area Mozilla needs to look into is web search, which at the moment is a more prominent part of the browser experience (besides Facebook ;). Maybe a collaboration between the Wikipedia and Mozilla foundations and other like minded outfits is in order. Search is dominated by a similarly small set of major players (Google, Baidou, Yandex, perhaps even Bing) who may all be using the same basic algorithms but tweaked with parameters that only their paymasters know of and can control. So while search is no longer rocket science, we often get subtly biased results.
It's a 15" HP laptop and yes it is the cheapest thing I could buy because I ONLY use it for the internet an occasional web browsing. It's less than a year old. My other non internet connected computers have up times approaching a year
The server is publicly available. Yes it is a bit of a hassle to set up, and quickly reverse engineering the protocol to replace it with a small script would probably be better, but you can, and I do.
Like, for example, those, who use "argument from popularity" fallacies. *nudge, nudge* *wink, wink*
They do spend most of their time and money on Firefox
I read it as "Incompetence in web browser security has been the rule since they were called Netscape."
I would be fine giving Mozilla money if I knew it would all go back into promoting FOSS. But that is not the case, because Mozilla always wants to run around playing politics and alienating half the country.
Another example of just making stuff up.
Actually it's quite irksome to read trolling like this given I spent most of my long, paid employment at Mozilla fixing bugs, including security issues and worked with hundreds of dedicated colleagues also doing that.
Firefox's security record is not much different from other Web browsers, and better than some. And it's getting even better now that the latest Firefox releases have quite good content-process sandboxing.
I reported the instability in the early days of Firefox. Lately, however, the instability seems to have become worse. By far the worst problem with Firefox is that it sometimes makes the Windows OS unstable.
"Firefox's security record is not much different from other Web browsers" - this might be the case for a naked browser, but it neglects Firefox's greatest strength - addons. I'd bet that an old version of Firefox running cookie, javascript and cross-site request blockers along with a traditional adblocker is far more secure than the current version of whatever MS, Google or Apple push out.
For me, the vast array of addons are what push Firefox above the other browsers and why I continue to use it. It's also why I see no need to run on the update treadmill and why I don't care that much if the current Firefox breaks some addons - my older version works perfectly fine right now, I'm fairly secure, so why mess with it?
But in any case - thank you for working on Firefox. I appreciate you keeping it alive, even if others may not.
"... it certainly doesn't happen for everyone or even most people."
I need to do a LOT of research. I often open windows and tabs in Firefox and then need to think about what I've seen, so I leave the windows and tabs open.
Then I do other research. That often results in having many windows and tabs open. Soon Firefox begins grabbing CPU power and memory. Eventually the Windows 7 Ultimate OS becomes slow. Sometimes it appears that Firefox has made Windows unstable.
Pale Moon 64-bits seems more stable than Firefox 56.0.2, so I use Pale Moon.
Waterfox sometimes brings up a message from anti-malware software I use, "Waterfox wants to act as a server." Scary.
It seems to me that Microsoft's payments to Mozilla Foundation, through Yahoo, have been successful at doing something Microsoft wanted, apparently. During Microsoft's involvement, Firefox has been degraded by making it impossible to use popular Firefox add-ons. Yes, I accept that there have been improvements in Firefox. However, it seems to me that the transition was handled badly. Maybe that was the intention of someone wanting to lower the usage of Firefox.