Speech & Audio

Speech was supposed to be the natural interface. Talk to the computer, it understands, it answers. Decades of work went into it, and the current state is stranger than either the optimism or the cynicism predicted.

Speech recognition is close to solved for one person speaking clearly into a decent microphone in a quiet room — better than human typists, and cheap. It falls apart on almost everything else: two people talking at once, a strong accent, a café, a vocabulary it has never heard. The reported accuracy figures describe the easy case, and the gap between them and your recording is where every speech project lives.

Text-to-speech went the other way. Naturalness — the thing that made synthetic voices sound robotic for forty years — is essentially solved. What remains is prosody: knowing which word to stress. That information isn't in the text, so a model reading a sentence in isolation is guessing at intent, which is why synthetic speech now sounds subtly uninvolved rather than obviously wrong.

The uncomfortable entries are here too. Voice cloning needs seconds of audio, detection is losing an arms race it structurally cannot win, and the practical consequence is that a voice is no longer evidence of identity. Speaker diarization — working out who spoke when — is the half of transcription that quietly gets it wrong. Music generation is blocked by provenance, not quality.

Start with Speech Recognition — and note that the highest-leverage fix in the whole field is a better microphone.