I watched the video...is this anything more than a mashup of groupchat and speech-to-text? Couldn't something similar be achieved with Google's speech to text API and IRC? I would've been impressed if the transcription was amazing, but there are errors in the video ("foreclosure" instead of "surfer culture", for one).
A very dismissive and short-sighted comment. The ambition here seems to go beyond the current implementation, to have a "magic" chat view that tracks voices and transcribes them in differing colors automatically and with minimal setup. I laud the effort and encourage the team to play this out for the sake of the hearing impaired. I hope that in the next decade deaf people--and their interlocutors--won't have to hobble together a slew of disparate technologies just to enable a group conversation.
It's not dismissive, it's inquisitive, and it lays out their reasoning why they don't understand what's special about this. In asking what's special, it gives the opportunity for proponents to address those questions specifically as to why they think it's special and different, so other readers that may have shared the original opinion get more information.
Your explanation about why you think it's special us useful a good example of a positive outcome of the original comment. The way you initially denigrate the question is not.
It's undeniably dismissive. Yes, the first sentence is a question, but "is it anything more than X?" is a rhetorical flourish meant to imply that the product is trivially replicated. The next sentence goes on to say that he's not impressed.
As pg put it:
Maybe you think you're making some sort of important point here. Or maybe you realize your comment is inane and you think it's witty. But (perhaps without realizing it) you and the people upvoting you represent one of the worst forces at work in the world. The people who ridicule new things when they first appear in incomplete form are one of the worst drags on innovation. [1]
I don't think it is, and I think the fact the person begins with a question asking if their assessment of the technology is correct is integral to that point.
As a real life example, I was leaning towards the original poster's interpretation of the product. The reply it spurred helped me see the product in a different light, and I think it has more merit than I originally did, even if I'm not sure the technologies in use, or even how they are combined, is especially new and noteworthy. As is all to often the case, it's the implementation that matters.
In think my initial opinion was dismissive, the original comment was inquisitive (if a bit critical, but I see nothing wrong with some light criticism), the reply it spurred was illuminating, and my resulting opinion was hopeful. I view that as part of HN's success, not something that needs to be overly policed.
GP here; you've used much better words to mirror my opinion. This being on Hacker News, my initial thought was that it would be an amazing technical display. Frankly, it isn't, but the discussion here has helped me realize that the reason we care about it is because it's an incredibly useful application of existing tech. That's still great—there's a ton of value outside of technical wizardry—but it just wasn't immediately clear to me after reading the article.
hi tsm, founder of Transcense here. beyond the impact we want to do, we always at some point built on top of others/existing technologies. Innovation definition is tricky. Is it in the technical implementation (an Instagram is not that complicated after all) or in the productization/distribution to market?
We're humbled to have been posted on HN, not from us. But stay updated, what's coming next will be even more interesting.
Looks to me like at least one personal already countered that claim, thus it is no longer undeniably dismissive. I would say your response to his question is even more dismissive of any "dismissal" that may had been interpreted from the OP.
> The ambition here seems to go beyond the current implementation, to have a "magic" chat view that tracks voices and transcribes them in differing colors automatically and with minimal setup.
To put it another way: real-time subtitles. Imagine having something like this in Google Glass. As a person with profound hearing loss, that blows me away.
This technology could easily be repurposed for subtitling videos.
I don't think a small team of people can be better than Google or Apple in building a speech to text technology. However, leveraging the tools available to help the deaf is the main idea - at least at the beginning - I think. Going forward, they will probably focus on their "Leap Motion" part of the project: from signs to text/voice and let big companies improve their text to speech algorithms that they would just use. Because that's where big improvement can be made.
This technology (speaker identification) is 10 years old, and [HMM/neural net] speech recognition is slightly older. So a small team could likely pull it off today just by implementing or using code published by researchers. As long as Transcense have control over the microphone(s), then it might work. Single mic/multispeaker speech recognition is still practically impossible unless the speakers take turns (not always the case).
You are completely correct -- this is, indeed, nothing more than a simple mash up of existing commodotized capabilities. Yet there appears to be a market opportunity to sell such a service for as much as $100-300/year. You should build a competing product (a simple mash up) and sell it.
