Amazon Kickstarts Natural Language Understanding By Open-Sourcing 'MASSIVE' Speech Dataset

To scale natural language understanding to every spoken language on Earth, Amazon.Inc has announced the release of its open-source'MASSIVE' speech dataset. The main goal of curating such a dataset was to assist researchers in developing virtual assistants that could easily be generalized to some of the world's most hidden languages. In addition to the database, Amazon has also published open-source modeling code to help developers create more capable virtual assistants. Several new technological breakthroughs in speech recognition and natural language understanding (NLU) have opened the way for voice-activated digital assistants such as Siri, Bixby, and Google Assistant. The primary shortcoming of these voice-controlled personal assistants is that they are only available in a few familiar languages.