Microsoft Makes Speech Recognition Faster and More Accurate on Windows Phone 8
Thanks to scientists at Microsoft, Bing’s voice search and voice-to-text are now twice as fast and 15 percent more accurate on Windows Phone 8. The Microsoft Research (MSR) team has been working on improvements in speed and accuracy over the past year by using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) technology.
The researchers found that DNNs can learn across languages, Microsoft said, which is important since speech recognizers have to trained on huge amounts of example speech data. Transcribing large files can be greatly reduced when data from one language can help improve accuracy for another.
The researchers found that DNNs can learn across languages, Microsoft said, which is important since speech recognizers have to trained on huge amounts of example speech data. Transcribing large files can be greatly reduced when data from one language can help improve accuracy for another.
“By coupling MSR’s major research breakthroughs in the use of DNNs with the large datasets provided by Bing’s massive index, the DNNs were able to learn more quickly and help Bing voice capabilities get noticeably closer to the way humans recognize speech,” the company said in a blog post. “We also made a few improvements under the hood that allowed Bing to more easily identify speech patterns and cut through ambient and background noise, cutting down response time by half and improving the word error rate by 15 percent, even in noisy situations.”
“I first realized the effect of the DNN when we successfully achieved significant error-rate reduction on the voice-search data set after implementing the context-dependent deep-neural-network hidden Markov model,” said Dong Yu, senior researcher in the Conversational Systems Research Center at MSR, in a statement. “Our results significantly advanced the state of the art, both in industry and in the academic community. Before our results, deep learning was only tested on small tasks and did not attract wide attention. I believe this is just the first step in advancing the state of the art. Many difficult problems may be attacked under this framework, which might lead to even greater advances.”
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Microsoft Makes Speech Recognition Faster and More Accurate on Windows Phone 8
