Dimitri Kanevsky has been researching the use of speech-recognition technology as an aid for people who are deaf or hard of hearing for more than three decades—for many years at IBM, and, since 2014, at Google. So when I met him at a recent Google event focused on the company’s accessibility efforts, I asked if he ever dreamed back in the 1980s that technology would ever get as good at understanding spoken words as it is in 2019.
“不，我希望它会变得如此出色fiveyears,” he responded. “And after five years, in the next five years. And then the next five years.” It was only when he joined Google that the tech achieved the accuracy that he once thought would come fairly quickly.
正如您现在已经想出的那样，Kanevsky正在使用他有发展的Android应用程序。现场测试Gallaudet University, the famed school for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, the app is called Live Transcribe. It works with more than 70 languages and dialects and will be available through Google’s Play Store—at first as a limited beta—as well as pre-installed on Pixel 3 phones.
Live Transcribe的目标是将实时转录放在需要的人的口袋里，以便随时随地提供。这与人类专家执行的老式远程转录服务形成鲜明对比的是，这需要提前安排并携带大量的每小时费用，这不是一个诸如商务会议之类的巨大问题，但是如果您只想问一个问题，则是一个障碍同事，与朋友聊天或与孙子一起玩。
Anyone who’s used Siri, Alexa, or the Google Assistant knows that computers have gotten dramatically better at accurately understanding speech in recent years. But there’s a big difference between understanding spoken commands and the sort of full-blown recognition that Live Transcribe does, where the goal is to correctly interpret anything one person might say to another. At Google’s event—where it left Live Transcribe running to transcribe the presenters as they spoke—the app didn’t get every word right. But it was mostly spot on, and its mistakes were usually nitpicky stuff rather than glaring blunders. It also uses AI to grasp the context of phrases—so it knows the difference between “New Jersey” (the state) and “new jersey” (the shirt you just bought).
实时抄录没有很多功能，这就是重点。Google考虑添加更多功能（例如能够保存成绩单的能力，这肯定会使像记者这样的人都很方便 - 但最终决定专注于优化它，以帮助聋哑人或聋哑人。它使用触觉反馈来提醒用户有人开始讲话，并允许那些不能或不想说话的人通过键入参加对话。为了隐私，它不会在云中存储过去的转录。
“You’re at a dinner party with your friends, and the environment is kind of loud,” said Google software engineer Ricardo Garcia by way of example during the accessibility event. “And sometimes you can hear the person right next to you just fine, but it’s difficult to hear someone across the table.” Sound Amplifier picks up sound using your Android phone’s microphones, dynamically processes it to boost quiet sounds and remove background noise, and lets you listen to the results through a pair of wired headphones. You can also adjust the audio in a variety of ways, such as fine-tuning it separately for your left and right ears.
声音放大器的作用使我有些想起，这是一个，耳塞短暂的启动多普勒实验室，旨在智能地滤除音频干扰，并让您将其设置调整为您的个人喜好和特定环境。但是，尽管多普勒的想法是将这项技术构建成一款时尚的Airpod风格$ 300的无线芽，但Google希望让任何戴着耳机和能够运行Android Pie的手机的人都可以使用。
Along with other journalists at Google’s event, I tried out Sound Amplifier by listening to it through a box that simulated hearing loss. But the day may well come when I don’t need a special box to gauge its effectiveness: One in three Americans over the age of 65 has hearing loss. Worldwide, says the World Health Organization, 466 million people are deaf or hard of hearing, a figure the WHO expects to grow to 900 million by 2055.
Google is fond of emphasizing that it likes to build things to reach large swaths of humanity—and rather than catering to a niche, these two new apps have a potential audience that’s large and only growing larger.