Thoughts

Some reasons why I believe we are more empathetic towards machines but not so with our fellow human beings.  We nicely rinse our kitchen utensils before putting them into out dishwasher (machine) but we refuse to do that when we have a maid who washes our kitchen utensils. We ask in an emphatic tone /Google please play me old Hindi songs/ to Google Home while it is /Sunil can you play the tape recorder/ We are furious and loose patience when we have had to stand in a queue at a bank (especially when one of the tellers has take a day off) but we are alright if we have to wait in the queue because the internet is down or the machine has gone down. We agree to walk the required steps when your pedometer saying you are still short of your daily steps,but if your partner reminds you to walk more you ignore him.

 “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  -- Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) or Speech Transcription (ST) is the process of converting human speech into text. Thanks to the availability of abundant speech data and the powerful processing power in the form of GPS and  significant strides made in Deep Machine Learning the process of speech transcription seems to have been solved. The cloud biggies have made it a commodity and have greatly packaged it making it a desirable toy (read smart speakers) to have. If you are wondering which toy? Well it is the Echo's, Home's.  Productization has had a free learning curve, understanding what people want by throwing free "search what you want" interfaces. These people behaviour on the web comes in handy to build reliable ASR's under the hood of smart speakers. The ASR performance get's even more enhanced when they know more about you (personal informati...