BMbmc7505·Nov 25, 2016
A few weeks ago, a deep learning researcher at one of the world's leading speech groups told me off-the-record that offline, human-parity speech recognition would be "coming soon" to mobile devices. Not sure s/he realized just how soon that would be. Even though state-of-the-art ASR is really expensive to train, recognition is extremely cheap to run, even on lower-power devices. [1][2] With specialized silicon, you can do this, continuously, for free, on something like a smartwatch. You don't need to open a websocket or call an API running on some beefy server to do this, speech-to-text is now a basic commodity. Fully offline, ubiquitous speech recognition is right around the corner. With human-level speech synthesis [3], speech applications are going to get very interesting, very quickly.
[1] http://niclane.org/pubs/deepx_ipsn.pdf
[2] ht