Interesting. It seems like in the "real world" WER is not really the metric that matters, it's more about "is this ASR system performing well to solve my use case" - which is better measured through task-specific metrics like the one you outlined your paper.
A pure ASR analog of this is how many/how much continuous utterances it enables. When I use tools like the one lunixbochs builds (including his own) the challenge as a user is trading of doing little bits at a time (slow, but easier to go back and correct) vs saying a whole ‘sentence’ in one go (fast and natural but you’re probably going to have to go back and edit/try again).
Sentence/command error rate (rate of 100% correct sentences/commands that don’t need any editing or re-attempting) is a decent proxy for this. It’s no silver bullet, but it more directly measures how frustrated your users will be.
If you really wanted to take care of the issues in the article, you could interview a bunch of users and find what percent of the, would go back and edit each kind of mistake (if 70% would have to go back and change ‘liked’ to ‘like’ then it’s 70% as bad as substituting ‘pound’ for ‘around’ which presumably every user will go back and edit).
The infuriating thing as a user is when metrics don’t map to the extra work I have to do.
Unfortunately that was the model I had in mind when I wrote that. I used it for maybe a month (I'm pretty sure), and my experience just wasn't as good as yours. It may be better than what preceded it, but it still drove me crazy. I came away with the conclusion that ASR as a technology just isn't there yet.
(and the conclusion that I need to prevent the return of RSI at all costs from now on. Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful that talon does as well as it does. It was a job saver.)
If so, December predates Conformer, so you're talking about the sconv model, which is the model I was complaining about upthread - it was very polarizing with users, and despite the theoretical WER improvements, the errors were much more catastrophic than the model that preceded it.
In either case, I'm constantly making improvements - I'm in the middle of a retrain that fixes some of the biggest issues (such as misrecognizing some short commands as numbers), and I've done a lot of other work recently that has really polished up the experience with the existing model.
I totally forgot about that conversation! Yeah I must be referring to sconv then. I was thinking of the new custom-trained model you were releasing to your paid beta patreon subscribers, and confused the two.
As a side rant, it turned out that simply stepping away from work for a few weeks around the holidays nearly fixed my RSI, which makes me so sad about the nature of my career whenever it crops back up.
Btw, any chance you've done any work on the `phones` or related tooling? I remember that (and editing in general) being a pain point.
sconv was especially disappointing because it looked so good on metrics during my training, but the cracks really started to show once it entered user testing. Conformer has been so much less stressful in comparison because most user complaints are about near misses (or completely ambiguous speech where the output is not _wrong_ per se if you listen to the audio) rather than catastrophic failure.
There's another interesting emergent behavior with my user base as I make improvements, which is that as I release improved models allowing users to speak faster without mistakes, some users will speak even faster until there are mistakes again.
Edit: Yep! There have been several improvements on editing, though that's more in the user script domain and my work has still been mostly on the backing tech. I'm planning on working on "first party" user scripts in the future where that stuff is more polished too.
> as I release improved models allowing users to speak faster without mistakes, users will speak even faster until there are mistakes again.
LOL. Users will be users! That's a hilarious case study, thanks for sharing.
> Yep! There have been several improvements on editing, though that's more in the user script domain and my work has still been mostly on the backing tech. I'm planning on working on "first party" user scripts in the future where that stuff is more polished too.
That would be wonderful! If you haven't seen them, I'd suggest looking at Serenade (also ASR) and Nebo (handwriting OCR on ipad) as interesting references for editing UI. They seem to have tight integration between the recognition and editing steps, letting errors be painless to fix by exposing alternative recognitions at the click of a button or short command. It lets them make x% precision@n as convenient as x% accuracy.
I would say not quite as convenient, because they lean on that UI to also make you constantly confirm top-1 commands that would've worked fine. As you can see in my Conformer demo video I can hit top-1 so reliably I don't even need to wait to look at the command before I start saying the next one.
