Voice Recognition As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
999 words · ~4 min read
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so when I was a kid having a conversation with your computer went a little something like this you would lie
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down on the couch and vent about all the problems in your life or whatever then
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you'd have to get up type your own response press enter and listen back to
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the insights that it had to offer pathetic right fast forward 25
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years and voice recognition a technology
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kind of like VR where someone is always claiming that they've made a big
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breakthrough and it turns out to be kind of crap is finally gaining widespread
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adoption so early forms of voice recognition had very limited
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vocabularies some of the first systems from the 1950s could only recognize
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about 10 words and even about 30 years
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later that number had grown to only around 20,000 which may seem like a lot
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but remember that the English language has over 1 million words on top of that
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early software couldn't predict what words you were trying to say by using
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context so to these programs it was just
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as likely that you were trying to say bacon and legs as bacon and eggs
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fortunately though we finally got computers in the late 1980s and early
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1990s that had more storage and processing power allowing them to
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comprehend more natural speech instead of forcing you to talk like this so they
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could understand and nowadays Technologies like Siri and Cortana don't
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rely on a limited dictionary or the relatively weak processor in your device
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at all instead they use huge Cloud
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databases that store millions of words and phrases and have lightning fast CPUs
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to understand what you mean with much more Precision Google speech recognition
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software even learns from real search engine strings and can also recognize a
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variety of accents so you can use it whether you're from Eastern Canada or
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Southern Texas but can the power of the cloud do more when you ask your phone
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for a sports score how does it know to
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tell you how your favorite team is doing instead of where to find a spor store
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well instead of listening to just one word at a time and I alluded to this
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before it listens to other words as well
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for context and uses probabilities to determine what you're trying to say this
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is a pretty involved process that uses complex mathematical models Google for
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example uses an artificial neural network that functions similarly to your
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own brain using dig neurons to learn what people are saying
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and you can actually see this in action as Google Now often changes what it
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thinks you said on the fly as you continue speaking and it gets better
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greater amounts of processing power have enabled everything from realtime
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translation to being able to talk to game characters with a VR headset to
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emotion tracking in which a computer can use the timing and pitch of your voice
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to figure out how you're feeling we're even seeing it deployed in fighter
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aircraft so Pilots can concentrate on mission objectives instead of fiddling
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with cockpit switches but although voice recognition has come a really long way
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its proliferation has presented us with some new challenges one big concern has
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been finding ways to filter out background noise so you'll still get
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correct results even if you're standing in the middle of a busy street and
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speaking of standing in public another massive issue is privacy many types of
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voice recognition software imp improve upon themselves by learning user habits
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and combined with Cloud processing we've already seen some real concerns such as
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with Samsung Smart TVs earlier this year
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which had a privacy policy which some people believed allowed Samsung to
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monitor your living room conversations so while the tech has
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great potential we also need to make sure it won't leave us all feeling like
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Winston Smith from 1984 and on the subject of 1984 you know
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what I don't miss about 1984 ugly websites that's right
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your liking you can build all kinds of different sites whether it's a Commerce
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or whether it's a blog or a or like an art portfolio or whatever the case may
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for sponsoring fast as possible all right so that's pretty much thanks for
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watching guys if you liked this video do that thing if you disliked it do the
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other thing don't forget to check out our other channels like Channel super
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fun where we do like crazy banana stuff like throw darts at pizzas and then eat
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pizzas covered in Marmite or hot sauce or whatever it's it's good stuff check
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it out up there and I think that pretty much wraps it up right don't forget to leave a comment if you have suggestions
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for future fastest possible videos don't forget to subscribe and I will see you
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guys next time