The use of only convolutional layers is likely one contributor to their engine’s impressive speed as the Backpropagation Through Time method used to train RNNs can be quite computationally intensive.

Recurrent layers are common to nearly every modern speech recognition engine as they are particularly useful for language modeling and other tasks which contain long-range dependencies. It is also the first ASR system which utilizes only convolutional layers, not recurrent ones. They advertise it as the first speech recognition engine written entirely in C++ and among the fastest ever. The Wav2Letter++ speech engine was created quite recently, in December 2018, by the team at Facebook AI Research. In order to integrate it into a larger application, your company’s developers would need to build an API around its inference methods and generate other pieces of utility code for handling various aspects of interfacing with the model. Also, the fact that DeepSpeech is provided solely as a Git repo means that it’s very bare bones. This could mean much less support when bugs arise in the software and issues need to be addressed. Due to some layoffs and changes in organization priorities, Mozilla is winding down development on DeepSpeech and shifting its focus towards applications of the tech.

It can also be compiled onto a Raspberry Pi device which is great if you’re looking to target that platform for applications.ĭeepSpeech does have its issues though. DeepSpeech also provides wrappers into the model in a number of different programming languages, including Python, Java, Javascript, C, and the. The great thing about using a code-native solution rather than an API is that you can tweak it according to your own specifications, providing ultimate customizability. Or, you can even take their pre-trained model and use transfer learning to fine tune it on your own data.

However, if you do have your own data, you can also train your own model.

One nice thing is that they provide a pre-trained English model, which means you can use it without sourcing your own data. Their model is based on the Baidu Deep Speech research paper and is implemented using Tensorflow. Try Rev AI Free: The World’s Most Accurate Speech Recognition API Mozilla DeepSpeechĭeepSpeech is a Github project created by Mozilla, the famous open source organization which brought you the Firefox web browser.

Open source speech to text