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These companies are shrinking the voice recognition ‘accent gap’ Posted on : Aug 13 - 2018

Speech recognition has come a long way since IBM’s Shoebox machine and Worlds of Wonder’s Julie doll. By the end of 2018, the Google Assistant will support over 30 languages. Qualcomm has developed on-device models that can recognize words and phrases with 95 percent accuracy. And Microsoft’s call center solution is able to transcribe conversations more accurately than a team of humans.

But despite the technological leaps and bounds made possible by machine learning, the voice recognition systems of today are at best imperfect — and at worst discriminatory. In a recent study commissioned by the Washington Post, popular smart speakers made by Google and Amazon were 30 percent less likely to understand non-American accents than those of native-born users. And corpora like Switchboard, a dataset used by companies such as IBM and Microsoft to gauge the error rates of voice models, have been shown to skew measurably toward speakers from particular regions of the country.

“Data is messy because data is reflective of humanity,” Rumman Chowdhury, global responsible AI lead at Accenture, told VentureBeat in an interview, “and that’s what algorithms are best at: finding patterns in human behavior.”

It’s called algorithmic bias: the degree to which machine learning models reflect prejudices in data or design. Countless reports have demonstrated the susceptibility of facial recognition systems — notably Amazon Web Service’s Rekognition — to bias. And it has been observed in automated systems that predict whether a defendant will commit future crimes, and even in the content recommendation algorithms behind apps like Google News.

Microsoft and other industry leaders such as IBM, Accenture, and Facebook have developed automated tools to detect and mitigate bias in AI algorithms, but few have been particularly vocal (pun intended) about solutions specific to voice recognition.

One that has is Speechmatics. Another is Nuance.

Addressing the ‘accent gap’

Speechmetrics, a Cambridge tech firm that specializes in enterprise speech recognition software, embarked 12 years ago on an ambitious plan to develop a language pack more accurate and comprehensive than any on the market. View More