zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
Machine translation and speech recognition. The state of the art for these is a multi-modal language model. I'm hearing impaired veering on deaf, and I use this technology all day every day. I wanted to watch an old TV series from the 1980s. There are no subtitles available. So I fed the show into a language model (Whisper) and now I have passable subtitles that allow me to watch the show.

Am I the only one who remembers when that was the stuff of science fiction? It was not so long ago an open question if machines would ever be able to transcribe speech in a useful way. How quickly we become numb to the magic.

>>retrac+J
> Am I the only one who remembers when that was the stuff of science fiction?

Would you go to a foreign country and sign a work contract based on the LLM translation ?

Would you answer a police procedure based on the speech recognition alone ?

That to me was the promise of the science fiction. Going to another planet and doing inter-species negotiations based on machine translation. We're definitely not there IMHO, and I wouldn't be surprised if we don't quite get there in our lifetime.

Otherwise if we're lowering the bar, speech to text has been here for decades, albeit clunky and power hungry. So improvements have been made, but watching old movies is a way too low stake situation IMHO.

>>makeit+1d
this is very dismissive and binary and thats what this whole article is about. AI skeptic expect that's either AGI or perfect with all use cases or otherwise its useless. SST, translation and TTS went really far away in last 2 years. My mother who doesn't speak english find it very useful when she my sister in US. I find it super useful while travelling in asia. Definitely much more useful than what we had in Google Translate.