How Baidu's AI Lab plans to solve speech recognition - with lots of data

Deep Speech 2 uses deep learning to recognise words in English and Mandarin, reports Tech in Asia

Baidu wants to build a speech recognition engine that’s 99 percent accurate, a threshold that Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu and founder of Google’s "Google Brain" deep learning project, believes will fundamentally change how humans interact with computers.

Baidu, which opened its Silicon Valley AI Lab in 2014, is hoping to carve out a space for itself as a leader in speech recognition. So far, it’s making impressive headway. The company’s latest speech recognition engine, dubbed Deep Speech 2, uses deep learning to recognise words spoken in English and Mandarin, at times outperforming humans in the latter, according to Baidu.

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