Microsoft improves machine speech recognition to near human perfection
Have you seen the movie Her? An ode to the importance that technology takes on in our lives and in which the protagonist is caught by her virtual assistant. Well it&39;s true that right now no one falls in love with Siri or Cortana but who knows, everything will work out."
This is relevant because in the film the naturalness of the assistant who stars in it is astonishing and her interaction with Joaquin Phoenix is total. We are still far from reaching those levels but everything will work out… and that first step is what Microsoft wants to take.
And it is that despite the fact that assistants like Siri or Cortana for now do not have a 100% natural language and do not allow you to have a conversation fluid, little by little its performance improves. And in this sense, from Redmond they have taken a new step on the road by making a machine reach human levels in voice recognition.
Are we going to end up falling in love with Cortana?
For now there is still plenty to fall in love with, but the system developed by scientists from Microsoft&39;s artificial intelligence division promises a lot. Apparently the level of precision achieved is almost human so that the machine is able to understand the user&39;s words as if we were talking to a friend or family member. "
A good practice that is manifested in the fact that the rate of words that have been misrecognized has been only 5.9%which is the same percentage of error that some people have when transcribing a conversation.
"The problem for now is that the tests have been developed in an ideal environment, perfectly prepared and clear, in real life in most cases it will not be like that. In this sense There are many tests and improvements leftuntil the system learns to listen in places with background noise and conversations that intermingle and cross. "
A first step for, who knows, if in the future we won't walk down the street talking with our cell phone as if it were our partner. This is something that, if we think about it, can make our hair stand on end, but… Who can hinder progress?
Source | Microsoft In Film Blog | 'Her', feelings 2.0
