Showing posts with label Speech Recognition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Speech Recognition. Show all posts

Artificial Intelligence - Speech Recognition And Natural Language Processing

 


Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that entails mining human text and voice in order to produce or reply to human enquiries in a legible or natural manner.

To decode the ambiguities and opacities of genuine human language, NLP has needed advances in statistics, machine learning, linguistics, and semantics.

Chatbots will employ natural language processing to connect with humans across text-based and voice-based interfaces in the future.

Interactions between people with varying talents and demands will be supported by computer assistants.

By making search more natural, they will enable natural language searches of huge volumes of information, such as that found on the internet.

They may also incorporate useful ideas or nuggets of information into a variety of circumstances, including meetings, classes, and informal discussions.



They may even be able to "read" and react in real time to the emotions or moods of human speakers (so-called "sentient analysis").

By 2025, the market for NLP hardware, software, and services might be worth $20 billion per year.

Speech recognition, often known as voice recognition, has a long history.

Harvey Fletcher, a physicist who pioneered research showing the link between voice energy, frequency spectrum, and the perception of sound by a listener, initiated research into automated speech recognition and transcription at Bell Labs in the 1930s.

Most voice recognition algorithms nowadays are based on his research.

Homer Dudley, another Bell Labs scientist, received patents for a Vodor voice synthesizer that imitated human vocalizations and a parallel band pass vocodor that could take sound samples and put them through narrow band filters to identify their energy levels by 1940.

By putting the recorded energy levels through various filters, the latter gadget might convert them back into crude approximations of the original sounds.

Bell Labs researchers had found out how to make a system that could do more than mimic speech by the 1950s.

During that decade, digital technology had progressed to the point that the system could detect individual spoken word portions by comparing their frequencies and energy levels to a digital sound reference library.

In essence, the system made an informed guess about the expression being expressed.

The pace of change was gradual.

Bell Labs robots could distinguish around 10 syllables uttered by a single person by the mid-1950s.

Researchers at MIT, IBM, Kyoto University, and University College London were working on recognizing computers that employed statistics to detect words with numerous phonemes toward the end of the decade.

Phonemes are sound units that are perceived as separate from one another by listeners.



Additionally, progress was being made on systems that could recognize the voice of many speakers.

Allen Newell headed the first professional automated speech recognition group, which was founded in 1971.

The research team split their time between acoustics, parametrics, phonemics, lexical ideas, sentence processing, and semantics, among other levels of knowledge generation.

Some of the issues examined by the group were investigated via funds from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency in the 1970s (DARPA).

DARPA was intrigued in the technology because it might be used to handle massive amounts of spoken data generated by multiple government departments and transform that data into insights and strategic solutions to challenges.

Techniques like dynamic temporal warping and continuous voice recognition have made progress.

Computer technology progressed significantly, and numerous mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers started to perform research in natural language processing and voice recognition.

The Speech Understanding Research (SUR) project at Carnegie Mellon University was one of the DARPA-funded projects.



The SUR project, directed by Raj Reddy, produced numerous groundbreaking speech recognition systems, including Hearsay, Dragon, Harpy, and Sphinx.

Harpy is notable in that it employs the beam search approach, which has been a standard in such systems for decades.

Beam search is a heuristic search technique that examines a network by extending the most promising node among a small number of possibilities.

Beam search is an improved version of best-first search that uses less memory.

It's a greedy algorithm in the sense that it uses the problem-solving heuristic of making the locally best decision at each step in the hopes of obtaining a global best choice.

In general, graph search algorithms have served as the foundation for voice recognition research for decades, just as they have in the domains of operations research, game theory, and artificial intelligence.

By the 1980s and 1990s, data processing and algorithms had advanced to the point where researchers could use statistical models to identify whole strings of words, even phrases.

The Pentagon remained the field's leader, but IBM's work had progressed to the point where the corporation was on the verge of manufacturing a computerized voice transcription device for its corporate clients.

Bell Labs had developed sophisticated digital systems for automatic voice dialing of telephone numbers.

Other applications that seemed to be within reach were closed captioned transcription of television broadcasts and personal automatic reservation systems.

The comprehension of spoken language has dramatically improved.

The Air Travel Information System was the first commercial system to emerge from DARPA funding (ATIS).

New obstacles arose, such as "disfluencies," or natural pauses, corrections, casual speech, interruptions, and verbal fillers like "oh" and "um" that organically formed from conversational speaking.

Every Windows 95 operating system came with the Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI) in 1995.

SAPI (which comprised subroutine definitions, protocols, and tools) made it easier for programmers and developers to include speech recognition and voice synthesis into Windows programs.

Other software developers, in particular, were given the option to construct and freely share their own speech recognition engines thanks to SAPI.

It gave NLP technology a big boost in terms of increasing interest and generating wider markets.

The Dragon line of voice recognition and dictation software programs is one of the most well-known mass-market NLP solutions.

The popular Dragon NaturallySpeaking program aims to provide automatic real-time, large-vocabulary, continuous-speech dictation with the use of a headset or microphone.

The software took fifteen years to create and was initially published in 1997.

It is still widely regarded as the gold standard for personal computing today.

One hour of digitally recorded speech takes the program roughly 4–8 hours to transcribe, although dictation on screen is virtually instantaneous.

Similar software is packaged with voice dictation functions in smart phones, which converts regular speech into text for usage in text messages and emails.

The large amount of data accessible on the cloud, as well as the development of gigantic archives of voice recordings gathered from smart phones and electronic peripherals, have benefited industry tremendously in the twenty-first century.

Companies have been able to enhance acoustic and linguistic models for voice processing as a result of these massive training data sets.

To match observed and "classified" sounds, traditional speech recognition systems employed statistical learning methods.

Since the 1990s, more Markovian and hidden Markovian systems with reinforcement learning and pattern recognition algorithms have been used in speech processing.

Because of the large amounts of data available for matching and the strength of deep learning algorithms, error rates have dropped dramatically in recent years.

Despite the fact that linguists argue that natural languages need flexibility and context to be effectively comprehended, these approximation approaches and probabilistic functions are exceptionally strong in deciphering and responding to human voice inputs.

The n-gram, a continuous sequence of n elements from a given sample of text or voice, is now the foundation of computational linguistics.

Depending on the application, the objects might be pho nemes, syllables, letters, words, or base pairs.

N-grams are usually gathered from text or voice.

In terms of proficiency, no other method presently outperforms this one.

For their virtual assistants, Google and Bing have indexed the whole internet and incorporate user query data in their language models for voice search applications.

Today's systems are starting to identify new terms from their datasets on the fly, which is referred to as "lifelong learning" by humans, although this is still a novel technique.

Companies working in natural language processing will desire solutions that are portable (not reliant on distant servers), deliver near-instantaneous response, and provide a seamless user experience in the future.

Richard Socher, a deep learning specialist and the founder and CEO of the artificial intelligence start-up MetaMind, is working on a strong example of next-generation NLP.

Based on massive chunks of natural language information, the company's technology employs a neural networking architecture and reinforcement learning algorithms to provide responses to specific and highly broad inquiries.

Salesforce, the digital marketing powerhouse, just purchased the startup.

Text-to-speech analysis and advanced conversational interfaces in automobiles will be in high demand in the future, as will speech recognition and translation across cultures and languages, automatic speech understanding in noisy environments like construction sites, and specialized voice systems to control office and home automation processes and internet-connected devices.

To work on, any of these applications to enhance human speech will need the collection of massive data sets of natural language.


~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram


You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 


Natural Language Generation; Newell, Allen; Workplace Automation.


References & Further Reading:


Chowdhury, Gobinda G. 2003. “Natural Language Processing.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 37: 51–89.

Jurafsky, Daniel, and James H. Martin. 2014. Speech and Language Processing. Second edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Mahavan, Radhika. n.d. “Natural Language Processing: Current Applications and Future Possibilities.” https://www.techemergence.com/nlp-current-applications-and-future-possibilities/.

Manning, Christopher D., and Hinrich Schütze. 1999. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Metz, Cade. 2015. “AI’s Next Frontier: Machines That Understand Language.” Wired, June 24, 2015. https://www.wired.com/2015/06/ais-next-frontier-machines-understand-language/.

Nusca, Andrew. 2011. “Say Command: How Speech Recognition Will Change the World.” 

ZDNet, November 2, 2011. https://www.zdnet.com/article/say-command-how-speech-recognition-will-change-the-world/.





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