Ask Slashdot: Who's Building The Open Source Version of Siri? (upon2020.com) 186
We're moving to a world of voice interactions processed by AI. Now Long-time Slashdot reader jernst asks, "Will we ever be able to do that without going through somebody's proprietary silo like Amazon's or Apple's?"
A decade ago, we in the free and open-source community could build our own versions of pretty much any proprietary software system out there, and we did... But is this still true...? Where are the free and/or open-source versions of Siri, Alexa and so forth?
The trouble, of course, is not so much the code, but in the training. The best speech recognition code isn't going to be competitive unless it has been trained with about as many millions of hours of example speech as the closed engines from Apple, Google and so forth have been. How can we do that? The same problem exists with AI. There's plenty of open-source AI code, but how good is it unless it gets training and retraining with gigantic data sets?
And even with that data, Siri gets trained with a massive farm of GPUs running 24/7 -- but how can the open source community replicate that? "Who has a plan, and where can I sign up to it?" asks jernst. So leave your best answers in the comments. Who's building the open source version of Siri?
The trouble, of course, is not so much the code, but in the training. The best speech recognition code isn't going to be competitive unless it has been trained with about as many millions of hours of example speech as the closed engines from Apple, Google and so forth have been. How can we do that? The same problem exists with AI. There's plenty of open-source AI code, but how good is it unless it gets training and retraining with gigantic data sets?
And even with that data, Siri gets trained with a massive farm of GPUs running 24/7 -- but how can the open source community replicate that? "Who has a plan, and where can I sign up to it?" asks jernst. So leave your best answers in the comments. Who's building the open source version of Siri?
SaaS is the end of Open Source (Score:1)
There is no code to copy and build upon. Without copies, there is no copyright law to enforce openness. Consider a world without the GPL. Now consider it without piracy as well. Welcome to SaaS.
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There is AGPL. It was made with SaaS in mind.
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There is AGPL. It was made with SaaS in mind.
But when you have dependencies on non-free services, a reliance on machine learning that requires big data or any kind of infrastructure that you can't easily replicate it means you aren't going to be doing the computing on your own computer. AGPL is good but often in the context of SaaS it isn't practical.
Sirius (Score:5, Informative)
Sirius (Ubuntu only I believe):
http://sirius.clarity-lab.org/sirius/
Re:Sirius (Score:4, Interesting)
>"Sirius (Ubuntu only I believe): http://sirius.clarity-lab.org/... [clarity-lab.org]"
Thankfully it doesn't appear to be related to or require Ubuntu at all.
The size of the farm shouldn't matter.... (Score:4, Insightful)
When you talk about the 'massive farm of GPUs' running 24/7 you ignore the fact that, because it is proprietary they are missing out on the potential compute resources out there.
How many people have run SETI@home, or gene folding efforts. We just need someone insightful and ingenious to find a way to deal with machine learning in an 'offline' way, and be able to present the user interface in a quick fashion.
It would have to start out very dumb, but with some great key algorithms I expect an open source option could move a lot faster than anything out there in this regard.
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We just need someone insightful and ingenious to find a way to deal with machine learning in an 'offline' way, and be able to present the user interface in a quick fashion.
It would have to start out very dumb, but with some great key algorithms I expect an open source option could move a lot faster than anything out there in this regard.
Precisely. I don't get what the misunderstanding is here among the Slashdot crowd.
Natural Language Processing is neat tech. Mechanics of speech recognition is neat tech. Integration of the two via a dispatch engine and scriptlets to go off an search Google, run a command, or whatever else one can script, is neat tech.
I'd use this ALL THE TIME if the data didn't leave my network, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
We can't duplicate a zillion far off machines running a Google-scale cluster, but it's hard to see why
Re:The size of the farm shouldn't matter.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's harder than you think. Those older systems sucked, and couldn't handle natural language queries. The issue is not processing power, it's having a large enough volume of training material and mimicking how the brain fills in gaps.
Training material isn't just a case of gathering samples. When the machine makes a mistake, it needs to understand why. The collection needs careful curation and sorting to be useful. Such databases are extremely valuable, and historically with OS projects they often started with a donation from a commercial body rather than from scratch.
Mimicking the brain is also extremely hard. Often people don't hear things very clearly or in full, due to environmental noise, poor pronunciation and the like. To compensate the brain fills in the gaps or makes assumptions. People have been trying to program those assumptions into computers since the 1980s. Again, a database of that knowledge will be vast and valuable. Either you throw massive human resources at building it, or you crawl the web and look at trillions of search queries like Google does.
That's also why they need a cloud service to do this. The database is vast and proprietary, and querying it far from a trivial SQL command.
It's not just a programming or AI training problem, which is why no-one is doing it. The closest thing the OS world has is probably Open Street Map, but creating that data set was far less laborious and uninteresting than training a computer to have some common sense will be.
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It also ignores the fact that people mishear and misunderstand each other. All. The. Time. Those gaps we fill in? Often erroneous. People actually expect more from computers than from other people: nearly perfect listening AND comprehension.
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I helped Apple wreck a nice beach.
Wasn't Android supposed to be Open Source? (Score:2)
Unless there's some way to get geeks to contribute their unused CPU cycles, like what SETI was doing...
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Search for aliens -- OoooOOOooooh!
Sex robot -- Giggity!
Create a digital assistant -- Meh.
Siri and Google Now aren't sexy. Maybe what's needed is a chatty digital alien sexbot that happens to double as an assistant. Slide in the useful features on the sly, like hiding dog medicine in a piece of cheese.
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Honestly, the only way that I see this happening is if Google decides to make their AI interface open source. Which they might do as a public service -- but we're still playing in Google's sandbox.
You mean like this [tensorflow.org]?
Possible (Score:4, Interesting)
First, I'm sure there's lots of Open Source being used in Google's implementation - just not where we can see.
There is a speech recognizer from CMU that might be a good starting point. I haven't heard about plain-language software, though. There is additional rocket science to be done. Not insurmountable given things we've already done.
Training with millions of people? Actually, that's the part that community development is good at.
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Agreed. But please keep port 25 closed to those home servers. My spam folder is bursting at the seams right now from all the broken Windows boxes in the world now. We don't need another vector.
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Actually, most spam doesn't come from broken Windows boxes any more and it hasn't been that way for a long time. Most spam comes from rooted linux servers these days. No spammer wants the old XP box running behind 128kbps DSL, they would much rather target the linux server sitting in a data center connected by multi-gigabit connections.
Mycroft, obviously. (Score:4, Informative)
Links, for the interested (Score:3, Informative)
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Yeah, that's what came to mind. It's maybe more of a Echo/Alexa competitor but in the same space.
World isn't ready for a open source Siri (Score:1)
Do you not realize that Siri must utilize a significant backend resource at the other end of a data connection to be effective, and that the backend requires substantial resources to operate and maintain? Siri is not some standalone app you download and forget. An open source equivalent would not be free, and would require a Kickstart and guaranteed subscriptions to be feasible. I don't think the world is quite ready for such a thing yet, not in a country populated by people willing to vote for either Tr
Re: World isn't ready for a open source Siri (Score:2)
Significant? Lookup cmu sphinx.
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It is that hard. Just ask Google how hard it is to get accurate transcription for its Voice service. Most of those transcriptions are so bad that their real value is as humor.
Jasper Project (Score:2, Informative)
It is in development..
http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/
Not affiliated with the project.. saw it sometime ago.. decided to wait till it further matures...
Why redesign the wheel (Score:2)
Sure, if there's an open source option, then the world can rest assured to be able to tinker with it themselves and that. And yes, Google could pull the plug on it. But for some reason, I feel that Google would just relea
Re:Why redesign the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
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Might not be doable open source (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a few application areas that are specialized and difficult enough that it they may not be doable within the Free Software paradigm. Richard Stallman himself, for instance, was not able to explain to me how you could get the right specialized engineers together to develop a free equivalent to Synopsys design compiler. Enthusiasts in this area don’t tend to be interested in writing software as a hobby, so you’d have to hire engineers, which means you have to pay for all the development.
With automatic speech recognition, it’s not just an AI problem. You need massive labeled datasets that cost money to acquire, and the experts who really know this stuff are moving to on to their next research project. So how are you going to get engineers to learn and implement the esoteric techniques used here? You’d have to pay them. Most people who would be interested in writing free software to do this just don’t know the subject area well enough.
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I imagine Stallman would point out that you could in fact pay engineers to work on it, but still release it under the GPL. Like Google does with a lot of its software, for example. Such specialist software is likely to have significant support requirements, which can be charged for, or users of the software could simply pay people to add the new features they want.
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This isn’t about the technical distinction between Libre and Gratis. This is about the perceptions of companies and software developers with the skills necessary to develop these things and the willingness of such people to develop open source software. Your nit-pick doesn’t change the fact that (a) some developers don’t have interest or skill in certain topics, and (b) if a company invests millions into developing software, they’re not going to share source code, regardless of sti
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if a company invests millions into developing software, they’re not going to share source code, regardless of sticker price.
Except this is exactly what Red Hat does. Apart from paying engineers to work on existing free software, Red Hat also open sources every product of every single company they acquire, because it's the company's core principle only to develop open source software.
Open source has compute farms too (Score:2, Informative)
Please (Score:2)
Mozilla (Score:4, Interesting)
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Amazon (Score:2)
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Don't believe me? Put a bandwidth monitor on your Echo and then test it. Let it sit there with a conversation in the room and then wake it up and ask it
It's not just speech recognition. (Score:3)
It's semantic recognition. Like what "it" in the prior sentence means -- in this case it's mainly a grammatical placeholder, but note how the various uses of "it" in *this* sentence are different.
The really impressive thing about Siri is how well (although still not human-well) it divines intent, not just phonemes. Add to that a massive scale attempt to get the phonetic recognition part right, and it's a bit like trying to launch a competitor to Google Maps.
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Not to mention the issues with It's [youtube.com].
Mycroft (Score:2)
There are several projects out there (Score:5, Informative)
Not yet mentioned yet is http://lucida.ai/ [lucida.ai] -- it's the successor to Sirius, and where all the ongoing development is focused.
Major options that are mentioned elsewhere in the thread:
https://mycroft.ai/ [mycroft.ai] (One of the most advanced,can actually be used in a pretty useful manner now, but sends snippets to Google for voice recognition--they intend to change that eventually, and they don't have a full-time open mic. Plus they aggregate audio across users so it's less identifiable as from a single source).
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Vaani [mozilla.org] (from the Mozilla project; supposed to enter beta this month according to that page)
Not that hard (Score:5, Funny)
Open Source Siri always responds with 'RTFM, noob'. Should be pretty easy.
Yes, this joke has been brought to you by the year 2005.
Not really an open source issue (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, this really is not an open source software issue, it is more of an infrastrcuture issue. People can make the code that will handle spoken queries and return answers and do it as a community. That's not really the tricky part. What the OP is looking for though is a massive project of which code is a small part. There is voice processing, servers to maintain, lots of fine-tuning and learning to do, if we want the assistent to speak then we need voice actors, etc. Plus hours and hours of testing and trials and putting it all in an interface people will like.
This reminds me of the "Where is the open source Facebook?" question. There are plenty of open source social network frameworks, but the code is a small part of the job. There's a massive amount of servers, advertising and social engagement that would need to happen for someone to make a new Facebook alternative. The open source code is there, it's the other parts which are missing.
The author also seems to think most commercial software up to this point has an open equvalent, but it doesn't. Geological, accounting, mapping and tax software tends to be commercial only. There are usually no open source alternatives because it's not something you can throw together and just publish on-line. You need auditors and geologists, accountants and so on to make these things work. It's not a coding problem so much as a business/product problem.
Look at the economics (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pointless to talk about creating an open-source version of Siri or Alexa unless you can explain how you're going to also create and maintain the server-side infrastructure needed to make it work. The Siri and Alexa interfaces may run on a client, but they're brain-dead without the server farms of Apple and Amazon behind them.
A similar example from the not-too-distant past: Aaron Swartz's download of a significant chunk of the JSTOR database. Those JSTOR articles wanted to be free, right? And they were set free - copies of Swartz's JSTOR download were available in a multi-GB torrent on several sites. Swartz's entire rationale was that those articles should be freely available to everyone.
So where is the free, open-source version of JSTOR today? It doesn't exist, because building and maintaining a server-side infrastructure that makes that database useable costs money ... which, of course, is why JSTOR required a subscription fee.
Solve out the server-side economics, and you have a shot at building an open-source Siri. Until then, you're better off putting your open-source efforts into client-side applications.
Re:Communism@Home (Score:3, Interesting)
timholman's post is incredibly insightful. To get around the problem he point out, I think we need to distribute these services to the community, as the OP suggests. The TelCo's make this difficult, with restrictive terms of service. A cloud powered by millions of home users is probably the technical solution to the economic problem, but to implement it we'll need to free the fibre.
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Solve out the server-side economics, and you have a shot at building an open-source Siri. Until then, you're better off putting your open-source efforts into client-side applications.
There is a new wave of decentralised open source applications occuring at the moment which changes the server-side economics considerably. Perhaps not so much in terms of something compute heavy like Siri, but certainly other bandwidth heavy things like youtube. Things like Ethereum [wikipedia.org], IPFS [wikipedia.org], ZeroNet [wikipedia.org].
Computer... (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I could build its equal in 10 minutes. (Score:5, Funny)
Then I can randomly have it just wait until the end and then say, "I can't find that person in your contacts, would you like me to search the local area for businesses of that name?" This is regardless of what their actual command was.
What I find interesting about Siri is that it so rarely gets what I am saying correct but when I insult it, it has got that right 100% of the time. "Fuck you Siri, you useless pile of shit." or any one of the zillion creative insults that I have thrown at it have resulted in some "If I had feelings, they would be hurt." So I know that it is not my microphone. It is the pile of crap just not getting what I am saying.
I am saying, "Call John Smith." or "Message John Smith" or "Read last message" or "Play audiobook, the John Smith Story."
I have a twenty minute ride home from work. I once spent the entire twenty minute ride home trying to send a message to someone that said, "I will be home in 20 minutes" (except that as I tried that number was ever growing smaller.)
Nearly the entire time it would just cut me off mid sentence. It would often be in the middle of my message. So it would end up saying "Would you like to send the message "I will"?" I was even trying to give it a run-on sentence such as IWillBeHomeIn20Minutes, so that it wouldn't pick up on a pause as the end. Then there is all the other bullshit that it sucks at. In the previous example it wouldn't confirm to whom I was sending the message. It would not allow me to change the message. So I started over and over just to see if I could get it to work. Yet as a confirmation that it was hearing me I would ask things like, "What is the second derivative of x^3+x^2+3x+9" and it would give me the correct answer.
Then after the map program nearly continuously putting me blocks from where I really am and thus giving me terrible directions in critical situations and then trying android's siri awesome equivelant, I switched to android.
On this note, I don't think that apple realizes how bad these missteps are getting. The fact that it took me 20 minutes to send no messages, the fact that it took me 20 minutes to remove that U2 bullshit from my phone, the fact that I can't remove BS apps from my phone, the fact that iTunes nearly always is jumping to music and movies (both on the phone and the desktop) when I am clearly not looking for either (such as when I am looking for a podcast). The fact that my mac pro(not macbook but my $6,000 dollar mac pro) is shoving iCloud down my throat. The fact that I can't repair half of this shit without using magic tools. The fact that little things like some extra memory costs about as much as a cheap version of the same device. All totals up to my typing this on a completely kick ass windows desktop that is presently charging my completely kick ass huge screened Android phone that I rooted and easily removed all the BS from.
While I am seemingly a single customer, I am also in charge of the purchasing for a large company. A company where I switched many of the execs and programmers to Apple. A switch that I am now reversing. Do I hate apple? Nope. The key is that Apple is no longer working for me, the devices that I bought weren't my servants, but little apple salesmen. Then there are things like XCode that was no longer really encouraging me to do things as a professional programmer, but trying to lock me into the apple ecosystem. Oddly enough this is why I originally left windows and microsoft. It was all about
Can you imagine a carpenter who got a hammer that would only hammer mastercraft nails? Or a hammer that regularly missed the nail regardless of your skill with a hammer?
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Can you imagine a carpenter who got a hammer that would only hammer mastercraft nails? Or a hammer that regularly missed the nail regardless of your skill with a hammer?
What would you expect from a Mastercrap hammer? You know you bought it from Crappy Tire right?
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Think around the problem (Score:2)
Think around, not through. What we want is efficient, intuitive and reliable human computer communication. If voice recognition is that hard, with many facepalm inducing errors, it is a stupid way to go. It is easier for humans to adapt to the machine. This means artificial dialects and simple AI and a bit of human training. Human consumers are lazy and want magic. Apple and MS try to grab them with the illusion of magic. It would be better for the free software to research what changes to speaking habits m
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Think around, not through. What we want is efficient, intuitive and reliable human computer communication. If voice recognition is that hard, with many facepalm inducing errors, it is a stupid way to go. It is easier for humans to adapt to the machine. This means artificial dialects and simple AI and a bit of human training. Human consumers are lazy and want magic. Apple and MS try to grab them with the illusion of magic. It would be better for the free software to research what changes to speaking habits make the software component easier, then write howtos and youtube guides as to how to speak to it.
Reminds me of the Palm Pilot and Graffiti. Rather than try to recognize normal handwriting like Microsoft was doing, Jeff Hawkins designed a simplified single stroke character representation that was very to recognize in software.
Siri is a cost center. How about Wikipedia? (Score:2)
The trouble is, unlike software development which is free (if you don't value your time), implementing an open source siri would require a data center fill with servers and this costs money. The fundamental problem is software development creates value while an open source siri is a cost center. Wikipedia would probably be a good candidate to pick up this task because they are already familiar with the open source cost center model, they are a knowledge database, and they already have the server infrastruct
Just don't put it on a server (Score:2)
Whoever is designing such a system needs to remember to keep it client-side.
Given the ridiculous amount of processing power available on even low-end phones and tablets now there's really no excuse to rely on the horrible latency and dependence that comes with server based voice recognition.
Any voice processing that relies on server-side processing has already failed.
What is There to Work With? (Score:2)
The Machine Learning part is the intriguing part. Books have been, and will continue to be written on this. What the hard part is, "Is how can a computer program find a valid fact, and be able to defend that the fact is valid?"
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What you are looking for does not exist (Score:2)
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How about open source version of something better? (Score:2)
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I imagine Siri is much more useful on a phone than on a standard laptop or desktop system. I use it all the time on my phone, but I don't expect it to be at all useful on my mini.
Being able to ask "how many tablespoons in half a cup?" and get a spoken answer, is really useful, especially if I'm in the middle of cooking at the time.
MyCroft (Score:2)
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Imagine a Beowulf cluster... (Score:2)
"And even with that data, Siri gets trained with a massive farm of GPUs running 24/7 -- but how can the open source community replicate that?"
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Does anyone actually know a programmer who want such a thing?
Me. I want FOSS voice commands for my phone.
I'd be much more likely to work on projects that help improve security and isolation.
That's precisely why I want such a thing. I don't use Siri etc precisely because the idea of an open mic to Google/Apple etc creeps me right out and represents a huge security hole The only software I'd begin to trust is an FOSS that I could really know what it was doing, and what it was sending.
I mostly just want it for car/bike navigation/ in can sending SMS (e.g. to an incoming phone call or text -- "reply with canned 'im driving' message"; or "tell X 'ill be t
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There are in the tens of CPU like microprocessors on your phone, only one of which runs Android or iOS. You may be feeding into a mike that goes directly through to Cupertino, but you may be able to turn that off. You're also feeding into a mike that may go directly to Samsung, or their Chinese supplier. And you won't be able to turn that off.
Courage (Score:2)
You don't think Apple are working on it?
iPhone 7 removed the headphone jack. iPhone 11 will remove the internal microphone.
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I never use Google Now/Siri/Cortana because I don't trust their respective owners with even more data about me than they already have.
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"I mostly just want it for car/bike navigation/ in can sending SMS (e.g. to an incoming phone call or text -- "reply with canned 'im driving' message"; or "tell X 'ill be there in Y minutes" and a few other commands. I'd want it to do all voice processing on the phone, and only send out specific types of requests to the internet. (e.g. if I request it to map a street address... it can send the address out."
That's exactly what Siri does. RTFM
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That's exactly what Siri does. RTFM
Link? Because everywhere i search i find references to the iphone basically recording your command, and sending the audio clip to be processed by the cloud.
It sounds like maybe in some cases it'll figure out an answer even without the cloud. But odds are it sent it to the cloud while it was processing it locally, just in case.
And while I'm find with the agent on my phone sending specific requests to the cloud, the raw audio of every command I give it... nope.
So if you have a link that counters this then enl
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Does anyone actually know a programmer who want such a thing?
I do. I have an Amazon Echo in my kitchen, and I use the voice recognition all the time. If I am cooking dinner, and I notice we are low on milk, I can say "Alexa, add milk to the shopping list" without washing my hands or touching my phone or laptop. I can use voice to turn lights on or off, request specific music, ask for news or information on specific topics, etc. The voice recognition works well, and it is a useful service.
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Do you drive? Because I do, and it's handy as hell. Read/write messages without removing your hands from the steering wheel, or make calls or prettt much anything you want.
there are many situations in which is very handy to use a phone/computer with your voice, and some have saved lives.
Well then you are an idiot!
When I am driving, I concentrate on Driving, not " Read/write messages" or "make calls or prettt much anything you want"
Driving a vehicle requires 100% attention to the task, and anyone who thinks differently is a fool!
Turn the phone off when driving please before you kill someone! ( I do not care if you kill yourself though)
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Do you drive? Because I do, and it's handy as hell. Read/write messages without removing your hands from the steering wheel, or make calls or prettt much anything you want.
there are many situations in which is very handy to use a phone/computer with your voice, and some have saved lives.
I drive, a lot. And I think I'm pretty decent at it. Part of my success as a driver has been recognizing how much distractions can negatively impact my driving, and by distractions I mean even just conversing with passengers or especially talking on the phone hands-free. I honestly don't want more excuses to use technology on the road, whether hands-free or voice-activated. Surely using Siri is safer than texting, but I feel that technology that requires less attention can lull people into a false sense of
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ARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!! = voice
why can't you tell the difference between speech and voice = speech
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"ARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!! = voice
why can't you tell the difference between speech and voice = speech"
Is this a speach?
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Re: Ask Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally don't like to use voice assistants, mainly for privacy reasons. And no, I don't particularly care if Google or Apple knows what I'm searching for. Rather, I don't particularly like when people I'm sitting near know what my immediate intentions are. I'm not doing anything nefarious, I just like keeping my personal business personal, which is much easier with Swype.
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"I personally don't like to use voice assistants, mainly for privacy reasons. "
Well I can tell you that just saying in the dark: "Hey Siri, wake me up at 7" beats getting up. going to the bathroom to get my glasses, putting some light on, ruining my Melatonin production and setting the clock manually, any time, any day.
Re: Ask Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Moving the switch on the clock radio two clicks to the right works as well.
Or setting the alarm on your phone earlier in the day when you had your glasses on and weren't concerned about Melatonin.
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https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]
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Night I got my iPhone 7 while in bed with light off, the wife pondered to me if it was gonna rain tomorrow. "Hey Siri, is it going to rain tomorrow?". Worked a treat.
Was pretty geek-cool. Had to laugh.
Re:Ask Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody is making them because it's too damn difficult.
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Nonsense. There would be enormous use of fully open source alternatives to Google search, Gmail, Call of Duty, Starcraft 2, Destiny, and dozens of other similar projects. The best, to my knowledge, fully open source search engine is Yacy and it totally sucks. Running your own email server isn't too hard, but getting your mail to recipients on Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo mail without relaying through one of the big services is all but impossible. There are plenty of nice graphical fully open source video games out there, but nothing with the artwork or the voice acting or the visuals on par with a top of the line AAA game. Nobody is making them because it's too damn difficult.
To be good, these things need experts in the field following good business and engineering practices. It's difficult, costly, and takes a lot of time, so only large international companies have much of a chance at being competitive. The forces of capitalism or government development seems to be the best ways currently to solve these kinds of massive undertakings. The internet has shown a lot of promise in allowing loosely-connected entities to collaborate, but once a project starts to look like it has va
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I think you're right. While there are a number of incredibly sophisticated free software projects - Gnu C Compiler, Linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, VLC, Postgres, etc... a lot of cutting edge stuff is proprietary and the free software equivalent comes out later and is often - though not always - inferior. Speech-to-text is one of those areas, as is Virtu
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No, there is interest and people are trying - Yacy is the example. The data and the service are distributed and decentralized, so it's technologically difficult to pinpoint the searches of individual users. And since there are hundreds of nodes, or at least there were, there are plenty of resources available.
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There is enough buzz with Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft to make a point that it is popular technology and shouldn't be dismissed because normal techies (myself included) find voice command technology lacking. However I see a lot of melenials using it as well in cars or other hands free devices. In some way voice commands are bringing back the command line interface.
The problem with open source versions is having a cloud system or massive computing willing to put up with the demand without a solid b
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Google's cloud speech API is a paid service
It was completely free when it was announced. It's still completely free for the first 60 minutes of recognition time.
And I only mentioned it because somebody asked if there's an API. There is.
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I'd like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as TensorFlow, is in fact, "corporate data/TensorFlow", or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, corporate data plus TensorFlow. TensorFlow is not a finished voice assistant itself, but rather a free component of an otherwise proprietary, fully functioning google system made useful by the google proprietary APIs, apps and web services comprising a full product experience as defined by the google leadership.
Many computer users query the
Siri is many things - many open source projects! (Score:3)
Siri is a complete stack of text reco engines, intent recognition tools, and backends. There are many initiatives like Sirius, Mycroft and YodaQA, and each does something slightly different - either focusing on the speech reco infrastructure, or just answering factoid questions...
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" either focusing on the speech reco infrastructure, or just answering factoid questions..."
So it's like me, when I speak, I can't listen.
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As an aside, your contempt for the average person won't help our cause. Elitism helps none of us - the best way to make open source stro
Open source version of siri / echo (Score:5, Informative)
The answer is MyCroft [mycroft.ai]
I plan on buying one of these the very soonest I can once they are actually shipping the hardware. Echo is crippled by the many limitations Amazon coded in on purpose -- it's basically something that looks up text matches and does something if it finds one. No language parsing worth a damn. Even so, it's very useful, and within those limits, you can make stuff for it, Amazon's pretty open about it as long as you can set up a secure server (ugh) or use their cloud (double-ugh.) Siri, as per usual for Apple, is a much more closed system, and frankly, it's of no interest at all to me because of that.
Mycroft is completely open source. I have very high hopes for it because of that. I have reams of my own natural language processing code I should be able to plug right in the moment there is a speech-to-text engine I can use directly. Others do as well. Custom apps in the home space, that are actually somewhat smarter than...
[if string == "turn on light" then TurnOnLight]
I suggest everyone check MyCroft out. Perhaps you'll be as enthused as I. I can hope. ;)
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I expect that an open source voice mode