Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
OpenAI’s new Whisper AI is able to listen to what we say, and transcribe it. Your voice goes in,
and this text comes out. Like this. This is incredible and it is going
to change everything! As you see, when running through these few sentences,
it works with flying colors. Well, stay tuned because you will see if we were
able to break it later this video. Can it be as good as a human? We will test that too!
But first, let’s try to break it with this speed talking person. Wow,
that’s going to be hard. So, let’s see the result. Whoa. That is incredible.
And that’s not all, it can do so much more! For instance, it does accents too. Here is an example.
So good. Now when talking about accents, I am here too, and I will try my luck later
in this video as well. The results will be…interesting, to say the least. But wait,
this knows not only English, but scientists at OpenAI said lets throw in 96 other languages
too. Here is French for example. And as you see, it also translates it into English. So cool!
This is all well and good, but wait a second, transcription AIs already exist, for instance,
here on Youtube, you can also request those for many videos. So, what is new here? Why publish
this paper? Is this better? Also, what do we get for this 680,000 hours of training? Well,
let’s have a look. This better be good. Whoa! What happened here? This is not a good start. For the
first sight, it seems that we are not getting a great deal out of this AI at all. Look. Here,
between the 20 to 40 decibel signal to noise range, which means a good quality speech signal,
it is the highest, so, is it the best AI around for transcription? Well, not quite!
You see, what we are also looking at is the word error rate here,
which is subject to minimization. That means that smaller is better. We noted
that 20 to 40 decibels is considered good quality signal. Here, it has a higher error
rate than previous techniques. But wait, look at that! When going to 5 to 10 decibels and below,
these signals are so bad that we can barely tell them from the noise, for instance,
imagine sitting in a really loud pub, and here is where Whisper really shines. Here, it’s the best.
And, this is a good paper, so we have plenty more data on how it compares to a bunch of previous
techniques, look. Once again, we have the word error rate. This is subject to minimization, lower
is better. From A to D, you see other previous automatic speech recognition systems, and it beats
all of them. And what do we have here? Now hold on to your papers, because…can that really be?
Is it as good as a human? That can’t be, right? Well, the answer is yes, it can be as good as
a human! Kind of. You see, it outperforms these professional human transcription services, and is
at the very least competitive with the best ones. An AI that transcribes as well as a professional
human does. Wow, this truly feels like we live in a science fiction movie. What a time to be alive!
Humans, okay, it is as good as many humans, that’s alright, but does this pass the ultimate
test for a speech AI? What would that be? Of course, that is the Károly test. That would be
me speaking with the crazy accent. Let’s see. Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers
with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. And Dear Fellow Scanners, I don’t know what is going on here,
it got my name perfectly, perhaps that is a sign of a superintelligence that is in the making.
Wow. The capitalization of 2 Minute Papers is alright too. Now, dear Fellow Scanners,
let’s try this again. And, now that is what I expected to happen. The regular speech part is
transcribed well, and it flubbed my name. So, no superintelligence yet, at least, not reliably.
So, what is all this good for? Well, imagine that you are looking at this amazing interview from Lex
Fridman on superintelligence. And it is one and a half hours. Yes, that is very short for Lex. Now,
we know that they talk about immortality, but, where exactly? Well, that’s not a problem anymore,
look. Andrej Karpathy ran Whisper on every episode of Lex’s podcast,
and there we go. This is the relevant part about immortality. That is incredible. Of course,
you Fellow Scholars know that Youtube also helps us with its own transcription feature,
or we can also look at the Chapter markers, however, not all video and
audio is on Youtube. And here comes the kicker - whisper works everywhere! How cool is that?
And here comes the best part. Two amazing news - it is open source, and not only that,
but you can try it now too. I put a link to both of these in the video description, but as always,
please be patient, whenever we link to something, you Fellow Scanners are so excited to try it out,
we have crashed a bunch of webpages before. This is what we call the Scholarly Stampede.
So, I hear you asking, okay, but what is under the hood here? If you have a closer look at the paper,
you see that this is using a simple learning algorithm, a transformer with a vast dataset,
and it can get very, very far with it. You see here that it makes great use of that 680
thousand hours of human speech, languages other than English and translation improves
a great deal if we add more, and even the English part improves a bit too. So,
this indicates that if we gave it even more data, it might improve it even more. And don’t forget,
it can deal with noisy data really well, so adding more might not be as big of a
challenge! And it is already as good as many professional humans. Wow. I can only imagine
what this will be able to do just a couple more papers down the line! What a time to be alive!
Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!