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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."
Sorry Mozilla, I don't trust you either.
Things like these are the reason why I'm not donating money to Mozilla. If they spent their money on just improving the browser (and whatever other administration around that were necessary), I'd be okay with it. But the browser is not their main priority; most of their money is spent on community projects: Mozilla is not an organisation that is developing a browser, they're a community project organisation that spends a drop in their bucket on improving the web browser.
Is worse than Hitler.
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.
They really need to train it on this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Is spent on executive salaries and job titles which pretty obviously have nothing to do with improving the engine code, rather than the UI, the themes, or crap like Pocket. Dozens of other things that either spy on you, make your web experience less pleasant each major revision, or generally waste money that should have been going to ACTUAL *BUG FIXES* for the past 12+ years.
Firefox's continuing swath of severe rated security issues is as much because of Mozilla mismanagement as it is because 'software development is hard'. 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.
Nepotism and the SJW analogy for the good 'ole boy system are all they know. Just look into Pocket if you need an example.
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.
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.
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.
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*
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.
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.
"... 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.