DeepSpeech for Dummies - A Tutorial and Overview

DeepSpeech is a neural network architecture first published by a research team at Baidu. In 2017, Mozilla created an open source implementation of this paper - dubbed "Mozilla DeepSpeech". The original DeepSpeech paper from Baidu popularized the concept of "end-to-end" speech recognition models. "End-to-end" means that the model takes in audio, and directly outputs characters or words. This is compared to traditional speech recognition models, like those built with popular open source libraries such as Kaldi or CMU Sphinx, that predict phonemes, and then convert those phonemes to words in a later, downstream process. The goal of "end-to-end" models, like DeepSpeech, was to simplify the speech recognition pipeline into a single model. In addition, the theory introduced by the Baidu research paper was that training large deep learning models, on large amounts of data, would yield better performance than classical speech recognition models.