No one understands me as well as my PC

摘要

"The problems we identified were noise, emotions, accents and daleks," says David Nahamoo. Did the leader of IBM's "superhuman" speech-recognition project just say he had a problem with daleks? The arch-enemies of the TV character Doctor Who certainly had unusual speech patterns but isn't it far more likely Nahamoo said "dialects"? Identifying the correct word would only take a moment's thought for most people, despite Nahamoo's Iranian accent and the noisy telephone line. But his best speech-recognition machines would probably never have got it at all. Which just goes to show how much work his team has left to do. Speech-recognition programs have been in development for around 40 years. Their success rate varies from application to application, but where humans get 1 word in 200 wrong, machines still make a mistake on about 1 word in 20. Nahamoo aims to close this gap and then have the machines overtake us - IBM hopes to have achieved superhuman speech recognition by 2010. "There's been a 25 per cent reduction in word error rate per year over 4 to 5 years," he points out. If this exponential improvement continues for another 8 years, he says, computers will be better than humans at recognising words.