Practical AI 25 years of speech technology innovation
May 11, 2021
Join Jeff Adams, CEO and founder of Cobalt Speech and Language and former lead of the Alexa team at Amazon, as he dives into the evolution of speech technology. He shares insights on the early challenges of language modeling and how that paved the way for groundbreaking innovations like Alexa. The discussion also highlights the vital role of speech tech in areas like medical diagnostics and language preservation, particularly emphasizing initiatives to safeguard Cambodian cultural narratives through innovative applications. A fascinating peek into the future of human-device interaction awaits!
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Career Start
- Jeff Adams stumbled into speech technology while searching for jobs online in 1995.
- He found a statistical language modeling position at Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, a company founded by Ray Kurzweil.
Statistical Language Modeling
- Statistical Language Modeling (SLM) predicts the next word in a sequence, crucial for speech recognition.
- Early SLM used n-grams, counting word sequences in large text corpora to estimate probabilities.
Combining Models
- Speech recognition combines language models with acoustic models that recognize sounds.
- Jeff Adams's career progression reflects the integration of these two aspects, from separate teams to combined approaches.