Towards an ImageNet Moment for Speech-to-Text

Speech-to-text (STT), also known as automated-speech-recognition (ASR), has a long history and has made amazing progress over the past decade. Currently, it is often believed that only large corporations like Google, Facebook, or Baidu (or local state-backed monopolies for the Russian language) can provide deployable "in-the-wild" solutions. Following the success and the democratization (the so-called "ImageNet moment", i.e. the reduction of hardware requirements, time-to-market and minimal dataset sizes to produce deployable products) of computer vision, it is logical to hope that other branches of Machine Learning (ML) will follow suit. The only questions are, when will it happen and what are the necessary conditions for it to happen? If the above conditions are satisfied, one can develop new useful applications with reasonable costs. Also democratization occurs - one no longer has to rely on giant companies such as Google as the only source of truth in the industry.