Say my friend Josh and I both use Google speech recognition. So here’s a thought experiment: Let’s consider three Americans who all speak English as a first language. And Google is regularly the highest performer - as compared to Bing, AT&T, WIT, and IBM Watson systems. Tatman published by the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) indicates that Google’s speech recognition is 13% more accurate for men than it is for women. ![]() Same for minorities and people with non-standard accents. ![]() The recommended remedy has been that women do extensive training (“Women could be taught to speak louder, and direct their voices towards the microphone…”) that their male peers don’t have to do. Did you see that episode of Silicon Valley where a car drives someone to an abandoned island? It’s funny on TV not so funny in real life.Īutomakers have admitted for years that their speech recognition doesn’t work as well for women. That means that speech recognition accuracy - or lack thereof - could prevent you from immigrating to a new country, getting a job, or traveling safely. Speech recognition now influences important aspects of people’s lives, including immigration decisions, job hiring, and transportation, among many other things. The fact is that speech recognition understands white male voices well…but what about the rest of us?Īccuracy rates are more important than playing music. It’s doubtful these biases are intentional, but they are still problematic. To be clear, I do not believe that the creators of these systems set out to build racist or sexist products. As with facial recognition, web searches, and even soap dispensers, speech recognition is another form of AI that performs worse for women and non-white people. Speech recognition has significant race and gender biases. While that’s an impressive number, it begs the question: 95% accurate for whom? In 2017, Google announced that their speech recognition had a 95% accuracy rate. Google reports that 20% of their searches are made by voice query today - a number that’s predicted to climb to 50% by 2020. Forecasts suggest that voice commerce will be an $80 billion business by 2023. Voice AI is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and powerful. ![]() Because these biases have serious consequences in people’s live, and because everyone deserves to have their voice heard. And it’s something we all need to keep talking about. Remember that women and minorities have huge purchasing power - why wouldn’t companies want to solve this problem? It’s a missed business opportunity. But if that alone doesn’t convince companies to fix the problem, they should consider that the accuracy of speech recognition also affects customer purchasing decisions. This is absolutely a matter of social injustice. And speech recognition now influences important aspects of people’s lives, including immigration decisions, job hiring, and transportation, among many other things.
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