Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Deep learning and massive data eliminate hand-engineered speech recognition pipelines

Adam Coates · Baidu's AI Lab Director on Advancing Speech Recognition and Simulation · Y Combinator · Aug 11, 2017 · at 10:23

Adam Coates, Director of Baidu's AI Lab, discusses how end-to-end deep learning models like Deep Speech replace complex, hand-engineered speech recognition decoders.

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“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.”

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More from Adam Coates

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.”
Adam Coates Aug 11, 2017 ▶ 3:49 Baidu's AI Lab Director on Advancing Speech Recognition and Simulation · Y Combinator
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.”
Adam Coates Aug 11, 2017 ▶ 21:05 Baidu's AI Lab Director on Advancing Speech Recognition and Simulation · Y Combinator
Opinion
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Adam Coates Aug 11, 2017 ▶ 25:51 Baidu's AI Lab Director on Advancing Speech Recognition and Simulation · Y Combinator
Insight
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“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…”
Adam Coates Aug 11, 2017 ▶ 26:21 Baidu's AI Lab Director on Advancing Speech Recognition and Simulation · Y Combinator
Insight
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“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.”
Adam Coates Aug 11, 2017 ▶ 11:29 Baidu's AI Lab Director on Advancing Speech Recognition and Simulation · Y Combinator
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.”
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