Google’s artificial intelligence is getting speedily (and worryingly?) better, as its recent slam-dunk of a human Go champion demonstrated. That victory required highly computationally-efficient AI rather than just brute force, something Google thinks could help it move speech recognition offline.
The speech recognition we’re all used to in Siri and Google Now relies heavily on cloud computing to decipher and make sense of humans. It’s necessary, because the processing power and memory banks required are way outside the bounds of most smartphones.
In a recent paper, a team of Google engineers outlined how they used deep machine learning techniques to run a lightweight speech-recognition program on a smartphone. The paper is dense, but the gist of it is dictation and voice commands working with a 13.5 percent error rate (compared to the ~8 percent of Google’s cloud-based system), all running natively on a Nexus 5 with a 2.2GHz processor and 2GB of RAM.
The benefits are obvious: if speech recognition doesn’t need an always-on internet connection to work, it makes building it into things cheaper, more power-efficient, and faster (no need to send all that data to a server and back). Now, whether you want your fridge to talk to you is a whole separate thing.
[Arxiv via Android Police]