You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up, we can (understand) with high accuracy.

The way to get better understanding of text is through statistics rather than through handcrafted grammars and lexicons. The statistical approach is cheaper, faster, more robust, easier to internationalize, and so far more effective.

We wanted speech technology that could serve as an interface for phones and also index audio text. After looking at the existing technology, we decided to build our own. We thought that, having the data and computational resources that we do, we could help advance the field. Currently, we are up to state-of-the-art with what we built on our own, and we have the computational infrastructure to improve further. As we get more data from more interaction with users and from uploaded videos, our systems will improve because the data trains the algorithms over time.