Skip to main content

High-performance speech recognition with no supervision at all

 https://ai.facebook.com/blog/wav2vec-unsupervised-speech-recognition-without-supervision/

 

What the research is:

Whether it’s giving directions, answering questions, or carrying out requests, speech recognition makes life easier in countless ways. But today the technology is available for only a small fraction of the thousands of languages spoken around the globe. This is because high-quality systems need to be trained with large amounts of transcribed speech audio. This data simply isn’t available for every language, dialect, and speaking style. Transcribed recordings of English-language novels, for example, will do little to help machines learn to understand a Basque speaker ordering food off a menu or a Tagalog speaker giving a business presentation.

This is why we developed wav2vec Unsupervised (wav2vec-U), a way to build speech recognition systems that require no transcribed data at all. It rivals the performance of the best supervised models from only a few years ago, which were trained on nearly 1,000 hours of transcribed speech. We’ve tested wav2vec-U with languages such as Swahili and Tatar, which do not currently have high-quality speech recognition models available because they lack extensive collections of labeled training data.

Wav2vec-U is the result of years of Facebook AI’s work in speech recognition, self-supervised learning, and unsupervised machine translation. It is an important step toward building machines that can solve a wide range of tasks just by learning from their observations. We think this work will bring us closer to a world where speech technology is available for many more people.

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Difference Between LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Home Edition (#31313) and LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 (#45544)

http://robotsquare.com/2013/11/25/difference-between-ev3-home-edition-and-education-ev3/ This article covers the difference between the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Home Edition and LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 products. Other articles in the ‘difference between’ series: * The difference and compatibility between EV3 and NXT ( link ) * The difference between NXT Home Edition and NXT Education products ( link ) One robotics platform, two targets The LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 robotics platform has been developed for two different target audiences. We have home users (children and hobbyists) and educational users (students and teachers). LEGO has designed a base set for each group, as well as several add on sets. There isn’t a clear line between home users and educational users, though. It’s fine to use the Education set at home, and it’s fine to use the Home Edition set at school. This article aims to clarify the differences between the two product lines so you can decide which

Let’s ban PowerPoint in lectures – it makes students more stupid and professors more boring

https://theconversation.com/lets-ban-powerpoint-in-lectures-it-makes-students-more-stupid-and-professors-more-boring-36183 Reading bullet points off a screen doesn't teach anyone anything. Author Bent Meier Sørensen Professor in Philosophy and Business at Copenhagen Business School Disclosure Statement Bent Meier Sørensen does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations. The Conversation is funded by CSIRO, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, UTS, UWA, ACU, ANU, ASB, Baker IDI, Canberra, CDU, Curtin, Deakin, ECU, Flinders, Griffith, the Harry Perkins Institute, JCU, La Trobe, Massey, Murdoch, Newcastle, UQ, QUT, SAHMRI, Swinburne, Sydney, UNDA, UNE, UniSA, UNSW, USC, USQ, UTAS, UWS, VU and Wollongong.

Logic Analyzer with STM32 Boards

https://sysprogs.com/w/how-we-turned-8-popular-stm32-boards-into-powerful-logic-analyzers/ How We Turned 8 Popular STM32 Boards into Powerful Logic Analyzers March 23, 2017 Ivan Shcherbakov The idea of making a “soft logic analyzer” that will run on top of popular prototyping boards has been crossing my mind since we first got acquainted with the STM32 Discovery and Nucleo boards. The STM32 GPIO is blazingly fast and the built-in DMA controller looks powerful enough to handle high bandwidths. So having that in mind, we spent several months perfecting both software and firmware side and here is what we got in the end. Capturing the signals The main challenge when using a microcontroller like STM32 as a core of a logic analyzer is dealing with sampling irregularities. Unlike FPGA-based analyzers, the microcontroller has to share the same resources to load instructions from memory, read/write the program state and capture the external inputs from the G