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Deep Learning for Speech Recognition (Adam Coates, Baidu)

Adam Coates, Hugo Larochelle, Andrej Karpathy, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Andrew Ng, John Schulman, Pascal Lamblin, Alex Wiltschko, Quoc Le, Yoshua Bengio, Shubho Sengupta

Deep learning has revolutionized speech recognition by replacing traditional, error-prone pipeline architectures with end-to-end neural networks that map raw audio directly to text, achieving character error rates below 6% in Mandarin. This shift utilizes techniques such as Connectionist Temporal Classification and advanced data augmentation to overcome historical limitations in accuracy and scalability, enabling systems to match human transcriber performance while significantly increasing user productivity. As researchers address computational bottlenecks through optimized training strategies like dynamic batching, these models are transitioning from experimental benchmarks to production-ready tools for consumer applications ranging from real-time captioning to hands-free vehicle control.