[scottlocklin]

Speech to text and machine translation worked about as well 20 years ago as it does now. Dunno where you were then. IPad unlocking with your face: what amazing progress. I feel so futuristic. Obviously this great boon to humanity is equivalent to say, those delivered in the decade between 1900 and 1910 (off the top of my head; safety razor, zeppelin, radio, air conditioning, powered heavier than air flight, electronic amplifiers, cellophane, mass produced automobiles, Haber process, talkie movies).

I think I'll take removing the last 20 years of environmental destruction and go back to using a 6 digit pin. Or a thumbprint reader.

FWIIW Dweeb Learning still has problems with image recognition, and people still don't understand how it works. Pretty sure that "progress" was mostly people writing frameworks for video cards.

[virgilp]

> Pretty sure that "progress" was mostly people writing frameworks for video cards.

Pretty sure you either don't know as much as you claim, or are knowingly claiming things that are blatantly false

[scottlocklin]

Cool story bro. Enjoy your iphone face recognition; that's pretty much all you got in the last 20. Seems like the Haber–Bosch process slightly more important.

If you have an actual example of a past 20 years developed machine learning idea which has pushed the needle for normal people in the same way the Haber-Bosch process did (making an extra 6 billion lives possible); I'd love to hear about it!

[Gibbon1]

I have about 50 years of solid experience. As a reference I have my grandmother who lived through most of the 20th century.

There is something hollow about the technological advances of the last 40 years.

[virgilp]

No I don't but I didn't claim that.

Whereas you did claim that speech to text and translation were about as good 20 years ago. Basically, to use your chemistry analogy... you're saying "Haber Bosch was nothing new, Cavendish produced the same kind of results hundreds of years ago!"

[scottlocklin]

Please characterize the amazing improvements the last 20 years have brought to these fields.

Your analogy is faulty: Haber Bosch was obviously something very different and new. Nothing in use today differs appreciably in accuracy or capability in speech to text or machine translation as it was 20 years ago.

[virgilp]

Care to tell me one single speech to text product that had at least a horrible 50% accuracy for Romanian 20 years ago? Because today I can dictate my messages to Google - that, plus the occasional correction, is faster than typing.

[virgilp]

No, it did not work adequately, not even close, not even in English. Maybe if you gave it good conditions (god forbid any background noise!) and spoke clearly you could get some decent results. But that's not "adequate". How many people did you know using speech to text 20 years ago?

It's exactly the difference you suggested with Haber Bosch vs precursors - "we know how to do it" is a far cry from "it's cheap & repeatable enough to be actually available in practice, to everyone".

[scottlocklin]

My apologies for not knowing the details of Romanian speech to text gizmos, but for English, Spanish and other more popular languages speech to text worked adequately, using contemporary hardware even back in the 1980s when Romania was still part of the Warsaw Pact. The fact that google or whatever has gotten around to training a vector quantizer on Romanian now isn't really a sign of actual technological progress. It's just last mile.