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Learning to Listen: Neural Networks Application for Recognizing Speech

Introduction

Recognizing words is one of the simplest tasks a human can do, yet it has proven extremely difficult for machines to achieve similar levels of performance. Things have changed dramatically with the ubiquity of machine learning and neural networks, though: the performance achieved by modern techniques is dramatically higher compared with the results from just a few years ago. In this post, I'm excited to show a reduced but practical and educational version of the speech recognition problem---the assumption is that we’ll consider only a limited set of words. This has two main advantages: first of all, we have easy access to a dataset through the Wolfram Data Repository (the Spoken Digit Commands dataset), and, maybe most importantly, all of the classifiers/networks I’ll present can be trained in a reasonable time on a laptop.

It’s been about two years since the initial introduction of the Audio object into the Wolfram Language, and we are thrilled to see so many interesting applications of it. One of the main additions to Version 11.3 of the Wolfram Language was tight integration of Audio objects into our machine learning and neural net framework, and this will be a cornerstone in all of the examples I’ll be showing today.

Without further ado, let’s squeeze out as much information as possible from the Spoken Digit Commands dataset!

Carlo Giacometti, Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Education & Academic

Launching the Wolfram Challenges Site

The more one does computational thinking, the better one gets at it. And today we’re launching the Wolfram Challenges site to give everyone a source of bite-sized computational thinking challenges based on the Wolfram Language. Use them to learn. Use them to stay sharp. Use them to prove how great you are. The Challenges typically […]

Stephen Wolfram
Education & Academic

User Research: Deep Learning for Gravitational Wave Detection with the Wolfram Language

Daniel George is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wolfram Summer School alum and Wolfram intern whose award-winning research on deep learning for gravitational wave detection recently landed in the prestigious pages of Physics Letters B in a special issue commemorating the Nobel Prize in 2017. We sat down with Daniel to learn more about his research and how the Wolfram Language plays a part in it.
Swede White, Public Relations Manager
Announcements & Events

Roaring into 2018 with Another Big Release: Launching Version 11.3 of the Wolfram Language & Mathematica

Last September we released Version 11.2 of the < ahref="https://www.wolfram.com/language/"Wolfram Language and Mathematica—with all sorts of new functionality, including 100+ completely new functions. Version 11.2 was a big release. But today we’ve got a still bigger release: Version 11.3 that, among other things, includes nearly 120 completely new functions. This June 23rd it’ll be 30 […]

Stephen Wolfram
Computation & Analysis

Web Scraping with the Wolfram Language, Part 1: Importing and Interpreting

Do you want to do more with data available on the web? Meaningful data exploration requires computation—and the Wolfram Language is well suited to the tasks of acquiring and organizing data. I'll walk through the process of importing information from a webpage into a Wolfram Notebook and extracting specific parts for basic computation. Throughout this post, I'll be referring to this website hosted by the National Weather Service, which gives 7-day forecasts for locations in the western US:
Brian Wood, Technical Communications & Outreach Manager
Education & Academic

Cultivating New Solutions for the Orchard-Planting Problem

Some trees are planted in an orchard. What is the maximum possible number of distinct lines of three trees? In his 1821 book Rational Amusement for Winter Evenings, J. Jackson put it this way: Fain would I plant a grove in rows But how must I its form compose             With three trees in each row; To have as many rows as trees; Now tell me, artists, if you please:             'Tis all I want to know. Those familiar with tic-tac-toe, three-in-a-row might wonder how difficult this problem could be, but it’s actually been looked at by some of the most prominent mathematicians of the past and present. This essay presents many new solutions that haven’t been seen before, shows a general method for finding more solutions and points out where current best solutions are improvable.
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
Current Events & History

The Wolfram Language Bridges Mathematics and the Arts

Every summer, 200-some artists, mathematicians and technologists gather at the Bridges conference to celebrate connections between mathematics and the arts. It's five exuberant days of sharing, exploring, puzzling, building, playing and discussing diverse artistic domains, from poetry to sculpture. The Wolfram Language is essential to many Bridges attendees' work. It's used to explore ideas, puzzle out technical details, design prototypes and produce output that controls production machines. It's applied to sculpture, graphics, origami, painting, weaving, quilting—even baking. In the many years I've attended the Bridges conferences, I've enjoyed hearing about these diverse applications of the Wolfram Language in the arts. Here is a selection of Bridges artists' work.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Current Events & History

Running the Numbers with the Illinois Marathon Viewer

I love to run. A lot. And many of my coworkers do too. You can find us everywhere, and all the time: on roads, in parks, on hills and mountains, and even running up and down parking decks, a flat lander's version of hills. And if there is a marathon to be run, we'll be there as well. With all of the internal interest in running marathons, Wolfram Research created this Marathon Viewer as a sponsorship project for the Christie Clinic Illinois Marathon. Here are four of us, shown as dots, participating in the 2017 Illinois Marathon: How did the above animation and the in-depth look at our performance come about? Read on to find out.
Eila Stiegler, Quality Analysis Manager, Wolfram|Alpha Quality Analysis Jeff Bryant, Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Education & Academic

Slicing Silhouettes of Jupiter: Processing JunoCam Images

With the images from the Juno mission being made available to the public, I thought it might be fun to try my hand at some image processing with them. Though my background is not in image processing, the Wolfram Language has some really nice tools that lessen the learning curve, so you can focus on what you want to do vs. how to do it.
Jesse Dohmann, Technical Documentation Writer, Document & Media Systems
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