Microsoft is taking speech recognition where no man has gone before. Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer, recently offered a demonstration in Tianjin, China at the Microsoft Research Asia’s 21st Century Computing event.
During his demonstration, Rashid showcased the latest results of a breakthrough in collaborative research between Microsoft and the University of Toronto–reducing the error rate for speech by more than 30 percent compared to older methods. That, explained Rashid, means that instead of having one word in every four or five incorrect, the error rate is only one wrong word in every seven or eight.
“While still far from perfect, this is the most dramatic change in accuracy since the introduction of hidden Markov modeling in 1979,” Rashid wrote in a blog post, “and as we add more data to the training we believe that we will get even better results.”
English to Chinese in Your Own Voice
Rashid’s presentation also demonstrated how Microsoft takes the text that represents his speech and runs it through translation. Specifically, he turned his English into Chinese in two steps. The system first took his words and found the Chinese equivalents, which he called the hard part. The second step reorders the words to be appropriate for Chinese.
“Of course, there are still likely to be errors in both the English text and the translation into Chinese, and the results can sometimes be humorous,” Rashid said. “Still, the technology has developed to be quite useful.”
Rashid magnified Microsoft’s achievement of enabling an English speaker to present in Chinese in his or her own voice. That feat required a text-to-speech system that Microsoft researchers built using a few hours of speech from a native Chinese speaker and properties of his voice taken from an hour of pre-recorded English speeches.
Star Trek-Like Capabilities
“Though it was a limited test, the effect…
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