Assertion Supported
Baidu's Deep Speech engine achieves superhuman accuracy on short queries
“The speech engine that we've built at Baidu called Deep Speech it's actually superhuman for these short queries.”
Insight
Deep learning and massive data eliminate hand-engineered speech recognition pipelines
“And in the past, it always looked like there was some fundamental problem that maybe we could never escape this need for these hand engineered representations. But it turns out that once you have enough data, all of those things go away.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Speech recognition could be a solved problem within a few years
“I sincerely think there's a chance that over the next few years we're going to regard speech recognition as a solved problem.”
Opinion
Workers are not currently at risk of AI taking their jobs
“I don't think we're at risk of robots taking our jobs right now.”
Insight
Rapid AI progress demands flexible full-stack machine learning engineers
“Because the field's moving so quickly we also need a different kind of person now. We also need people who are sort of chameleons, who are these highly flexible types that can understand and even contribute to a research project but can also simultaneously Shi…”
Insight
Neural networks learn English spelling and exceptions purely from data
“But now it's all data-driven, so if I hear enough of these unusual words, You see these neural networks actually learn to spell on their own, even considering all the weird exceptions of English.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Next-generation AI will transition from bolted-on features to immersive products
“So as we have the next wave of AI products I think we're going to move from these sort of bolted on AI features to really immersive AI products.”
Insight
Voice AI latency of 200ms versus 100ms is clearly perceptible to users
“That the difference between 50 or a hundred milliseconds of latency and 200 milliseconds of latency is actually quite perceptible. And it really anything we can do to bring that down actually affects user experience quite a bit.”
Insight
Society must apply text-style skepticism to generative AI media
“I think culturally we're all going to have to exercise a lot of critical thinking. We, we've always had this problem in some sense that I can read an article that has someone's name on it and notwithstanding understanding writing style I don't know for sure wh…”
Disclosure
Baidu trains English speech AI on 10,000 to 20,000 audio hours
“Our English system uses like 10 to 20,000 hours of audio. The Mandarin systems are using even more for top end products.”
Insight
Pre-training on thousands of voices enables low-data voice cloning
“If I learn to mimic lots of different voices and then you give me the 1001st voice you'd hope that the first thousand taught you virtually everything you need to know about language and that what's left is really some idiosyncratic change. That you could learn…”
Disclosure
Baidu crowdsources cheap audiobook recordings to acquire English training data
“We actually do a lot of clever tricks in English where we don't have a lot of a large number of English language products. So for example, it turns out that if you go onto, say, a crowdsourcing service, you can hire people very cheaply to just read books to yo…”
