Microsoft's Cognitive Toolkit on GitHub in all its speech-recognising glory

Microsoft has released a catalogue of AI software under Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on GitHub today. The new toolkit is an updated version of the Computational Network Toolkit, which was developed by a team of computer scientists interested in speech recognition and natural language processing. It has since expanded into …

[Nick Kew]

Brewing for 20 years?

Computer speech recognition had been brewing for about 20 years when I worked (in academia) in the field. That was the early 1990s.

One of the conclusions of my work was the meaninglessness of percentage accuracy figures as a measure of performance. They're about as useful as measuring lengths in pieces of string. Information-theoretic measures (entropy) do an altogether better job.

[Sammy Smalls]

Except it's not. Is it?

It's the documentation.

Which is a bit of an odd mix. 'Here's some open source documentation for our 'open' (closed source) web service'.

More accurately, this is 'Please, please PLEASE use Bing. Someone? Anyone?'

I was initially genuinely excited, only to come crashing down to earth. Ah well.....

[Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese]

Accuracy

For speech recognition, a simple accuracy percentage is not such a good measure. To my mind, what's important is when the computer gets it wrong, how does it get it wrong?

For example:

If I say "I wish to declare that I like cheese" and the computer interprets my words as such, then all is good. That's a success.

If it interprets my words as "I wish to declare that I <UNKNOWN> <UNKNOWN>" then that's what I'd call a 'safe' failure. It got it wrong, and it is recognisable as such

If it interprets my words as "I wish to declare that I loathe Jesus" then it appears that it's captured a valid phrase but it's output is in fact miles wide of the mark.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people are scrooge saying anything good about MS. But I saw many of them praising Google or remaining neutral on almost same situation. Yeah now-a-days MS and Google are almost the same(both are bloody ad company who tracks your every move without permission). company. But MS's comparative fault is that they are not so clever in marketing like Google so it's easier reveal their secret desire. In past Google many times acted as their X product is like open source to attract free volunteers. After using them for some years, they shows their real face, dramatically change tone of licence and make it full corporate product in which your all contribution are their direct property. Both company should rot in hell along with Dan Marino.

[Not That Andrew]

To be fair, people have had 30 years to get used to hating Microsoft. Google has only been hateable for 10 or so years, luckily I got an early start.