Regional AI
"I'm sorry Dave, but one on't cross beams gone owt askew on t'treadle"
Microsoft has build a cloud service for applications so that software can attempt to understand specialist vocabularies and cope with dialects and accents. Speech recognition works better if the algorithms can pick from a limited range of possible words and phrases, rather than attempting to recognise everything. Microsoft's …
Undoubtedly, but it still fails with way too much regularity on anything that is not the simplest of soundbytes.
One day, we will undoubtedly have speech recognition capability that can actually recognize what a person is saying with a 95% or better success factor, but expert systems have to be fine-tuned and it has already taken years to get them where they are. I'm not holding my breath for this.
SING on, there's nobbut thee an' me;
We'll mack th' heawse ring, or else we'll see.
Thee sing thoose little songs o' thine,
As weel as t' con, an' aw'll sing mine.
We'll have a concert here to-neet,
Soa pipe thi notes eawt clear an' sweet:
Thee sing a stave or two for me,
An' then aw'll sing a bit for thee.
That's reet, goa on, mi little guest,
Theaw tries to do thi very best,
An' aw'll do th' same, then thee an' me
May get eawr names up yet tha'll see.
Why, th' childer's listenin' neaw at th' door;
There's creawds abeawt! there is, forshure.
Heaw pleosed they seem—dear little things!
Aw'd sooner sing for them than kings.
"Some customer support lines now use speech recognition to automate routing your call to the right person; it is often no better and sometimes worse than the old method of "press 1" for this and "press 2" for that."
It is 2017, believe it or not IVR and speech recognition to automate routing has been in use since the late 1990's and certainly products from the majors such as Nuance in the early 2000's were up to the task.
The R&D was in continuous voice/natural language processing, semantic analysis and inference ie.what does "Hello Alexa" mean?
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is to take a closer look at Microsoft's buy of talkative AI specialist Nuance.
Today's announcement follows reports that the purchase, an all-cash transaction valued at $19.7bn when announced in April 2021, was set to get a nod from EU regulators.
To be clear, the CMA is only at the investigation stage and has invited comments from interested parties with a closing date of 10 January 2022. It is pondering if the results of the proposed acquisition will end up substantially hobbling competition and warrant a full blown enquiry.
Swiss computer peripherals manufacturer Logitech has teamed with Chinese AI and internet company Baidu to make a voice-dictation mouse.
The Logitech Voice M380 wireless mouse looks and acts like a regular mouse but with a special button to initiate voice dictation. Baidu claimed recognition facilitates content creation at two to three times the speed of what one can type.
The device supports dictation in Chinese, English, and Japanese, and can translate content to English, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, and Thai. However, as of this month, you can only pick it up in China. There's no word on when or if it will be available elsewhere.
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