Google turns to Reddit for accents to help improve voice recognition

From #Siri to #Alexa, voice interfaces are becoming increasingly common, but for all their recent advances, they often struggle with one of the most basic characteristics of human speech: accents. The problem is so prevalent that computer scientists have identified the existence of a "machine voice," a standardized way of speaking that individuals with accents adopt in the hope of being understood. Researchers even warn about the existence of a "speech divide" that ostracizes individuals whose accents differ from those the machines have been trained on. As is often the case with technology built on large data sets, the problem begins with the input. If you only train your interface using a narrow selection of voices, then it won't know how to respond to accents that fall outside of its frame of reference. According to Marsal Gavalda, the head of machine intelligence at #YikYak and an expert on speech recognition, academics have been studying the problem since the '80s.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/17/12402176/google-voice-recognition-accents-reddit

Google, Inc., isn't just the world's biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world's biggest censor.

The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency. #Google is not the only company suppressing content on the internet. #Reddit has frequently been accused of banning postings on specific topics, and a recent report suggests that #Facebook has been deleting conservative news stories from its newsfeed, a practice that might have a significant effect on public opinion – even on voting. Google, though, is currently the biggest bully on the block.

When Google's employees or algorithms decide to block our access to information about a news item, political candidate or business, opinions and votes can shift, reputations can be ruined and businesses can crash and burn. Because online censorship is entirely unregulated at the moment, victims have little or no recourse when they have been harmed. Eventually, authorities will almost certainly have to step in, just as they did when credit bureaus were regulated in 1970. The alternative would be to allow a large corporation to wield an especially destructive kind of power that should be exercised with great restraint and should belong only to the public: the power to shame or exclude.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated