How one team turned the dream of speech recognition into a reality
How one team turned the dream of speech recognition into a reality When Françoise joined Google in 2005, speech recognition was an experimental field, still in its first decade of using statistical modeling to assess the accuracy of translation. "We started working on speech recognition at Google as a small research effort. You have to remember that this was before smartphones or any of these kinds of technologies were on the market, so the potential of speech recognition the way it is used now was not quite as obvious yet." But Google's ability to quickly process large data sets via MapReduce combined with new data collection methods and the need to provide voice search on mobile phones, pushed this 'small research effort' front and center, fast. The Google speech team launched its first smartphone app in 2008, followed by the desktop-based Voice Search in June 2011, supporting only American English queries at first. Their original algorithms to interpret...