Researchers are training AI to listen just like humans

Artificial intelligence researchers are making progress towards their goals of training AI systems to understand speech from audio input alone, just like humans do. At the moment, the majority of AI can only recognize speech by first translating it into text. A lot of progress has been made in terms of lowering word error rates and increasing the number of languages support. However, having AI understand speech through audio input alone is a big jump from this stage, so researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have taken a step towards it by mapping speech to images rather than text. It doesn't sound like much on the surface, but the phrase'a picture is worth a thousand words' makes it clear just how big an impact it could have. At the Neural Information Processing Systems conference the researchers demonstrated their method in a presentation based on a paper they've written.