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0 pointsocdtrekkie8y ago0 comments

I remain a bit baffled by this. Speech to text on a desktop PC with a 400 MHz processor back in the day was "pretty decent". I don't know if I really feel like what people get with Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google, etc. is actually significantly better... so why is this prohibitively expensive in our modern era of multi-gigahertz phones?

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5 comments · 2 top-level

catmanjan8y ago· 3 in thread

Because customers aren't satisfied with pretty decent when it comes to speech to text, if it isn't state of the art there's someone just around the corner doing it better....

ocdtrekkieOP8y ago

I mean, is the processing power of today's voice software actually impossible to do without a cloud service subscription, or is it that the developers working on the problem today would rather not work on it for local operation because they can't charge cloud pricing or collect user data that way?

Most local voice processing solutions seemed to stop dead in their tracks, developmentally, when companies figured out we could make this a cloud service, but I don't know if I really believe it's technically unfeasible the other way.

zapita8y ago

There is at least one startup working on a local solution (I forget their name), but my understanding is that it's still technically inferior - for example it can only support very small vocabularies.

The bottleneck is simply raw gpu compute power available.

I completely agree with you that the technical gap might be caused in part by incentives from cloud companies. Why invest in researching something that makes your core business less valuable?

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jvolkman8y ago

Speech-to-text still works when my Pixel 2 is in airplane mode, so there must be some local fallback. It's good, but not as good as the cloud-backed version.

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skybrian8y ago

My guess is that the difficulty is consumer behavior, not hardware. Despite how Amazon's success makes it look, getting people to buy an Internet-connected speaker with a microphone and install it in their home is not that easy. It would probably be even harder for a startup to sell them a second one from a different vendor. An app for the device they already have seems like an easier sell?

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