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From: gt@hpfcmp.HP.COM (George Tatge)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Re: Practical effects of AI (speech)
Message-ID: <930001@hpfcmp.HP.COM>
Date: Tue, 3-Nov-87 09:29:16 EST
Article-I.D.: hpfcmp.930001
Posted: Tue Nov  3 09:29:16 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Nov-87 05:37:44 EST
References: <267@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Ft. Collins CO
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>
>Those of us who work on speech will be very encourage by this enthusiasm.
>However,
>
>(1) Speaker-independent continuous speech is much farther from reality
>    than some companies would have you think.  Currently, the best
>    speech recognizer is IBM's Tangora, which makes about 6% errors
>    on a 20,000 word vocabulary.  But the Tangora is for speaker-
>    dependent, isolate-words, grammar-guided recognition in a benign
>    environment.  Each of these four constraints cuts the error rate 
>    by 3 or more times if used independently.  I don't know how well
>    they will do if you remove all four constraints, but I would guess
>    about 70% error rate.  So while speech recognition has made a lot 
>    of advancements, it is still far from usable in the application you 
>    mentioned.
>
>Kai-Fu Lee
>Computer Science Department
>Carnegie-Mellon University
>----------

Just curious what the definition of "best" is.  For example, I have seen
6% error rates and better on grammar specific, speaker dependent, continuous
speech recognition.  I would guess that for some applications this is
better than the "best" described above.

George (floundering in superlative ambiguity) Tatge