Comment by makeitdouble
6 days ago
> Am I the only one who remembers when that was the stuff of science fiction?
Would you go to a foreign country and sign a work contract based on the LLM translation ?
Would you answer a police procedure based on the speech recognition alone ?
That to me was the promise of the science fiction. Going to another planet and doing inter-species negotiations based on machine translation. We're definitely not there IMHO, and I wouldn't be surprised if we don't quite get there in our lifetime.
Otherwise if we're lowering the bar, speech to text has been here for decades, albeit clunky and power hungry. So improvements have been made, but watching old movies is a way too low stake situation IMHO.
this is very dismissive and binary and thats what this whole article is about. AI skeptic expect that's either AGI or perfect with all use cases or otherwise its useless. SST, translation and TTS went really far away in last 2 years. My mother who doesn't speak english find it very useful when she my sister in US. I find it super useful while travelling in asia. Definitely much more useful than what we had in Google Translate.
I'd understand calling it dismissive if your didn't choose as counterpoints:
- your mother visiting your sister (arguably extremely low stake. At any moment she can just phone your sister I presume ?)
- You traveling around (you're not trying to close a business deal or do anything irreversible)
Basically you seem to be agreeing that it's fine for convenience, but not ready for "science fiction" level use cases.
We have the tools to do this, and will have commercial products for everything you listed in the next couple years.