“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.…
