Baidu’s research lab announces ‘Deep Speech’ recognition system

Baidu Research, the research division of search giant Baidu, unveiled last night a speech recognition technology it has dubbed “Deep Speech.”

According to an official release, Baidu’s team of artificial intelligence researchers in Sunnyvale designed Deep Speech to recognize and interpret voice input in noisy environments like restaurants, where ambient noise or other factors can muddle accuracy.

“Deep learning, trained on a huge dataset — over 100,000 hours of synthesized data — is letting us achieve significant improvements in speech recognition,” said Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu Research, in a statement. “I’m excited by this progress, because I believe speech will transform mobile devices, as well as the Internet of Things. This is just the beginning.”

For years, Baidu has been researching deep learning and artificial intelligence as it continues to build out its search technology and mobile product suite in China. Earlier this may, the company announced it will invest US$300 million in its Sunnyvale facility, for which the company poached Coursera co-founder and Stanford professor Andrew Ng to lead.

Beyond Deep Search, Baidu has unveiled a number of projects – some public, others internal – that harness artificial intelligence. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal last November, Ng described Baidu Eye and the company’s partially-automated cars as “research explorations” rather than products. Earlier this year, the company also released an image search feature in its translation app that (with mixed results) identified objects in photographs.