♪ (Music fades in) ♪
(Chirping)
(Vocalizations, different languages)
(Talking overlaps in background)
(Computerized beeping)
(Man) We come into this world with the innate ability to learn to interact
with other sentient beings.
(Child vocalizing)
(Man) Suppose you are to interact with other people by writing little messages.
(Man) It'd be a real pain.
(Man) And that's how we interact with computers.
It's much easier just to talk to them... just so much easier...
(Man) If the computers could understand what we're saying.
For that, you need really good speech recognition.
(Narrator) The first speech recognition system was developed by Bell Laboratories
in 1952. It could only recognize numbers spoken by one person.
In the 1970s, Carnegie-Mellon came out with the Harpy System.
This was able to recognize over 1,000 words and different pronunciations
(Narrator) of the same word. - (Man) Tomato - (Woman) Tomato
(Narrator) Speech recognition continued in the 80s with the introduction of the
Hidden Markov Model, which used a more mathematical approach
to analyzing sound waves that led to many breakthroughs we have today.
You're taking in very raw audio wave forms
like you get through a microphone
on your phone
or (unintelligible)
(Woman) We chop it into small pieces and it tries to identify which phoneme
was spoken in that piece of speech.
- Phoneme is a primitive unit for expressing words.
(voicing phonemes shown above)
And then you stitch those together into likely words like Palo Alto.
- Speech recognition today is good at transcribing what you've said...
(Man, to phone) What's the weather like in Topeka?
(Man) You can talk about travels, your contacts, like, "Where can I get pizza?"
(Phone) Here are the listings for Pizza.
(Man) "Where's the Eiffel Tower?" (Phone) The Eiffel Tower is ...
(Woman) We've made tremendous improvements very quickly.
(Man, to phone) Who is the 21st President of the United States?
(Phone beeps) (Phone) Chester A. Arthur was the 21st...
(Man, to phone) Okay, Google, where is he from?
(Man) Years ago, you had to be an engineer to interact with computers.
Today, everybody can interact.
- One thing still in its infancy is understanding.
- We need a far more sophisticated language understanding model
that understands what the sentence means.
We're still a very long way from that.
(Beeping)
♪ (Soft background music) ♪
(Woman) Our ability to use language is one of the things that helps us have culture.
It's one of the things that helps us pass on traditions across generations.
Figuring out how the system of language works, even though it seems easy,
turns out to be very hard, but is one that every baby understands by 2 years old.
(Girl) There's two of them. (Woman) There's two Ls, yeah (spells word)
- Language is extremely complex and sophisticated...
- From the semantics
- (Man in chair) Ironies... - (Woman) Strong accents...
- (Man) Facial expressions, human emotions...
- Because that's part of how we communicate.
- Humor...
(Aside) Do I have to careful not to offend the dinosaur?
- Language has so many different layers and that's why it's
such a difficult problem.
(Man) The (unknown) human brain and the learning algorithms in it
are far, far better at things like language understanding
and they're still a lot better at pun recognition.
- Whether or not we replicate exactly what the brain does, to understand
language and speech, is still a question.
(Beeping)
(Man) For many years, we believed that neural networks should work better than
the dull existing technology