Siri and a standard dialect

[Tom Zurinskas]

from http://tinyurl.com/sirimethod

How Siri works - Speaks to the need for establishing a standardized dialect.


Every time you speak to Siri, your iPhone connects to a cloud service, according to a Smart Planet article by Andrew Nusca, and the following takes place:

The server compares your speech against a statistical model to estimate, based on the sounds you spoke and the order in which you spoke them, what letters might constitute it. (At the same time, the local recognizer compares your speech to an abridged version of that statistical model.) For both, the highest-probability estimates get the go-ahead.
Based on these opinions, your speech — now understood as a series of vowels and consonants — is then run through a language model, which estimates the words that your speech is comprised of. Given a sufficient level of confidence, the computer then creates a candidate list of interpretations for what the sequence of words in your speech might mean.
In this sense, Siri doesn’t really “understand” anything said to it, it simply uses a constantly expanding probability model to attach combinations of letters to the sounds you’re saying. And once it has computed the most likely identity of your words, it cross checks them against the server database of successful answers to similar combinations of words and provides you with a probable answer. This is a system of speech recognition that sidesteps the pragmatics question discussed by Pinker by employing a huge vocabulary and a real-time cloud-based feedback database. And Siri’s trademark cheekiness? Apple has thousands of writers employed inputting phrases and responses manually into the Siri cloud, continually building out its “vocabulary” while relying on statistics for the context.
Does this constitute true speech recognition, or is this just a more robust version of old-time AOL chat bots? If this is the way that speech recognition technology will evolve in the future, do you think that it will cross a database threshold so as to be indistinguishable from true speech recognition, even if there’s no pragmatic “ghost in the machine,” as it were? Or will computers never be able to truly "learn" language?


Tom Zurinskas, Conn 20 yrs, Tenn 3, NJ 33, now Fl 9.
See how English spelling links to sounds at http://justpaste.it/ayk

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org