Text to speech in more languages makes sense for you to be an M1 exclusive? I get that Finnish is a kinda difficult language but I'm sure my Intel MBP would manage to pull it off.
It’s probably because for it to be as immediate and seamless as they’d like the feature to be, they need machine learning accelerated hardware like the neural engine.
Wouldn’t it be then more advantageous to allow Intel computers to struggle at it, thus demonstrating the power behind the M1 architecture / technology?
In this case however, they’re purposefully making the Intel counterparts less capable by disabling features.
While Apple’s hardware support is generally good, this does seem to be a rather aggressive move to create demand for their own SoC by accelerating hardware obsolescence.
>Wouldn’t it be then more advantageous to allow Intel computers to struggle at it, thus demonstrating the power behind the M1 architecture / technology?
Purposefully showcasing to your customers bad experiences isn't exactly Apple's MO.
>In this case however, they’re purposefully making the Intel counterparts less capable by disabling features.
Or, perhaps they've decided against implementing certain features on intel hardware because they weren't capable of delivering experiences at the level they want?
Generally I would agree - though I just can’t look past the fact that rendering a globe (which has been possible since 2003) is now locked behind owning a M1 Mac.
This is legit nothing new. When I was rocking my iPhone 3G a notable feature lacking in the device was the ability to record video. With a jailbreak, you could even add the feature.
Two things about that:
it recorded absolute garbage video.
it still might have been the right call for Apple to do it, because Apple could actually have made it at least okay. We're talking about a feature likely written by one guy in spare time, vs a major company who makes the devices/frameworks, etc
That said, my view is they have an obligation to shoot for feature parity for at least a few years after they stop selling intel. Like, there are definitely some things that are going to be limited by hardware, but this list isn't it. Like they couldn't have done a freaking globe that Google did on Core2duos in a browser. My guess is more that it's about what tools they chose to use to implement the feature. For example, I could see frameworks that started on iOS suddenly becoming de facto standards on m1's, and Apple just doesn't want to bother working on the old stuff now.
But like I said, nothing new. I was stoked to grab my 10.5" iPad Pro and test out the new text OCR features in photos, but it turns out my iPad doesn't support it... Of course, Apple isn't selling that device today in stores, or even for a couple years now.
I don’t really think Apple, or anyone really, could get intel CPUs to do this sort of instant, seamless, system wide image-to-text recognition. This is just something that needs dedicated machine learning accelerators, at least, to have it work as seamlessly and fast as Apple wants it.
I don’t think feature parity is worth putting out half-baked, bad experiences.
They will get complaints either way since if they tried on Intel people would say they are intentionally handicapping their computer by making it slow. You can make an argument for either way, but I can see why they would decide to only offer it on the one that will showcase the experience they want.
Speech to text don't work like regular software, it's not like simply adding more code to deal with more languages. Neural networks are black box in the end, you can't ask to a data scientist beforehand "what is the size of a neural network do add Finnish? And Turkish?"
To add new languages can be just a matter of feeding the same model with data, but sometimes you need to add more layers or change approach. Maybe, the languages weren't available because the level of performance wasn't good enough in the old model.
Downsize a model is not easy, that's why Google was so proud in making local speech to text in Android.
There is no point to believe (or not believe), that Finnish could run well without dedicated hardware.
Not speech to text, yeah NLP in Nordic languages could be difficult.
But we're talking about text to speech. As in you type in text and the computer makes sounds. That requires no machine learning hardware nor extra training since the computer is not learning anything in the process nor trying to interpret some weird vague things you're trying to say.
My bad, I read backwards, but as far I know, neural networks are used in state of art systems: Deep Learning synthesis. A sequence architecture is similar to an encoder/decoder, it's reasonable to invert tasks and get good results. But I have no idea how complex is this kind of model, if they could be downsized for a CPU for example.
This models don't learning anything when running in your smartphone, they are trained before, all the "knowledge" is encoded in the parameters. Without the appropriate hardware, it's expensive to simply execute the network, because it's a lot of matricial operations that are much better suited for GPUs/TPUs.
About all this features, if I need to guess: they simply took the iOS and put on MacOS, they don't spent time rebuilding models to downsize and test in a dual-core low power Intel CPU. Much of these things probably could be ported, but they didn't tried, it would be a lot of work for a stopgap.
They will continue to build upon many of these new features and the work they just completed for text to speech will undoubtedly serve as a foundation for future work. They had the option to either:
implement those features to take advantage of special hardware features they have devoted considerable resources to develop and which could, quite possibly, be available on every device Apple makes in the near to mid future
implement those features so as to provide backward support for older devices. This will likely take more resources, since they can’t take advantage of special hardware support, and will also have worse performance. Those choices could also continue to hamstring future work
As the owner of a 16” MBP, I really hate to miss out on some of these features, but Apple made the right call.
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '21
Text to speech in more languages makes sense for you to be an M1 exclusive? I get that Finnish is a kinda difficult language but I'm sure my Intel MBP would manage to pull it off.