Building ML products

For building any product, whether it includes ML or not, the first step is to identify the problem you're trying to solve. ML is a great tool for solving some problems, but there are many where it's best to start simpler. In this post, let's consider working for a company building a hypothetical product for automatically transcribing university lectures. We're going to build an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system which is tuned to work well for lectures -- this is something that definitely needs machine learning at its core. The product team have decided to start small and focus initially on just Physics lectures as a proof of concept.