[PD] speech recognition and ethics

[Spencer Russell]

I saw a really interesting talk last year by Johan Schalkwyk, the head
of the Google speech recognition group. One of the points he made was
that while Google's algorithms are important, they got a lot more
leverage from the sheer amount of data they have access to. It allows
them to get away with much simpler algorithms. I think that's one of the
biggest problems with trying to compete with Google and Apple on speech
recognition, because OSS developers just don't have access to a huge
corpus of data.

Even though a lot of that data is unlabeled (they don't know what the
actual words are that correspond to the audio), they have a huge amount
of interaction data, so they can for instance look at whether the user
tried multiple times with a particular phrase or whether the user
accepted a given transcription.

It seems like if we want an open-source speech recognition package we
should focus on finding ways to get an accessible shared corpus. Unless
there was some tricky licensing I think that corpus would also benefit
the big guys though, so their corpus would remain a proper superset of
what's available to OSS developers.


On Sat, Feb 7, 2015, at 11:39 AM, Jonathan Wilkes via Pd-list wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> Here's a fun thought-experiment: suppose you're doing a port of Pd,
> and the graphics toolkit you're using will include functionality to
> hook in to Google's speech recognition API. Such an API could make the
> software accessible to people who would otherwise find it very hard to
> write Pd patches.
>
> However, the API works by shipping off your audio data to Google's
> servers, doing the computation on their machines, and sending you back
> the results.
>
> Do you use the API in your port, or not?
>
> I'm decidedly not going to use that API, for what I think are obvious
> security, privacy, and philosophical reasons. But I'm curious just how
> obvious the security and privacy implications are to others here. How
> many people would use a speech-patching mechanism that sends all your
> speech to Google?
>
> I'm also increasingly worried by the apparent gap between the
> usability of Google and Apple's products, and the seemingly glacial
> pace at which _usable_ free software speech recognition is being
> developed. My position won't change, but I'm afraid it's becoming more
> symbolic than practical as these insecure tools become a natural part
> of most people's lives.
>
> -Jonathan
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