"To put that in context, this is in my opinion — and to the best of our lab’s knowledge — the best system at transcribing Mandarin voice queries in the world."
Anyone here that has actually used their system and compared it to others?
The data looks impressive, but I am a bit skeptical of this claim, because I compared the Baidu OCR API for Chinese character recognition with the one from Microsoft recently. And I was disappointed. In many cases they were just as good as Microsoft's litte OCR dll that ships with Windows 10 [1]. Of course, OCR and speech recognition are somewhat different fields, but if anyone is an expert for Chinese language, then it should be Baidu.
> Of course, OCR and speech recognition are somewhat different fields, but if anyone is an expert for Chinese language, then it should be Baidu.
It's not about being experts in Mandarin. The basis of their approach is that it doesn't encompass any expert design. It's an end-to-end deep learning approach. From the article:
> Our system is different than that system in that it’s more what we call end-to-end. Rather than having a lot of human-engineered components that have been developed over decades of speech research — by looking at the system and saying what features are important or which phonemes the model should predict — we just have some input data, which is an audio .WAV file on which we do very little pre-processing. And then we have a big, deep neural network that outputs directly to characters. We give it enough data that it’s able to learn what’s relevant from the input to correctly transcribe the output, with as little human intervention as possible.
> One thing that’s pleasantly surprising to us is that we had to do very little changing to it — other than scaling it and giving it the right data — to make this system we showed in December that worked really well on English work remarkably well in Chinese, as well.
So they've quickly trained their Deep Speech engine [1] to process Mandarin after first training it to transcribe English, without injecting specific language expertise into the engine.
Finally, I strongly doubt the OCR and speech recognition teams are the same. I don't know about the OCR team but their speech recognition team is based in California [2] and includes Andrew Ng and Awni Hannun from Stanford University.
Does it have to be open-source? If free, but not trainable and restricted to Windows apps/phone is good enough, then I recommend the Microsoft OCR library. It gives you very, VERY good results out of the box. An excellent piece of work from Microsoft Research. To test it, see for example https://ocr.a9t9.com/ which uses Microsoft OCR inside.
How does the PDF OCR process compare to images? I uploaded a sample PDF with very clear sans-serif text (printed to PDF from a webpage) and there seems to be some odd substitutions. "prohibitecL" instead of "prohibited", "ac" instead of "QC" (as part of an address), random clipping of the first letter in a few lines and random use of a capital i instead of 1.
Overall very good, I'm just wondering if the library is better with image files than PDFs?
I know about Germany: Yes, they can. There are some limits in how many hours/year you are allowed to work. I think it is the equivalent of 2-3 months fulltime/year).
It worked well for me: 5 times our usual sales, at a 60% discount -- that is still twice the usual daily revenue. Plus the option to earn more when it comes to renewals.
Sometimes sales attract customers that wouldn't have bought before (either the price was too high, or customers were unfamiliar with the product).
Sometimes sales simply pull demand from the future (folks who would have bought, but haven't gotten around to it yet). If you experience the former, great! If you experience the latter, then you're actually losing money.
There is some data about this claim here: https://gigaom.com/2014/12/18/baidu-claims-deep-learning-bre...
Anyone here that has actually used their system and compared it to others?
The data looks impressive, but I am a bit skeptical of this claim, because I compared the Baidu OCR API for Chinese character recognition with the one from Microsoft recently. And I was disappointed. In many cases they were just as good as Microsoft's litte OCR dll that ships with Windows 10 [1]. Of course, OCR and speech recognition are somewhat different fields, but if anyone is an expert for Chinese language, then it should be Baidu.
[1] http://blog.a9t9.com/2015/09/baidu-ocr-api.html