Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 166 posts

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#41

Post by follower »

It's unfortunate that another comment that links to Rhasspy has been downvoted (I assume because it lacked any other context) so I wanted to mention the project with some additional context: https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/

While I've not used the entire Rhasspy project myself (but trying it out is on the long list of things to do :) ) I have used the offline Text-To-Speech sub-project Larynx...

...and it is amazing!

Larynx is significantly ahead in terms of quality of output & variety of voices (fifty--across multiple languages, accents & genders) of any other FLOSS Text-To-Speech project I've tried.

I think the relative new-ness of the project is part of the reason Larynx (https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx/) currently flies under the radar.

If the rest of Rhasspy is as good as Larynx I'd imagine it's worth trying out.

Larynx demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBmhDf8cl0k

Samples of pre-trained voices: https://rhasspy.github.io/larynx/#en-us

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#42

Post by lukifer »

follower wrote: post #41

It's unfortunate that another comment that links to Rhasspy has been downvoted (I assume because it lacked any other context) so I wanted to mention the project with some additional context: https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/ While I've not used the entire Rhasspy project myself (but trying it out is on the long list of things to do :) ) I have used the offline Text-To-Speech sub-project Larynx... ...and it is amazing !…

I can vouch for Rhasspy, it's an amazing and flexible piece of software, though it does require some setup and tech knowledge (albeit with a usable web GUI); and it's very DIY on defining the actual voice commands. I recommend pairing it with Node-RED [0] for routing commands to devices, it has plugins for most things.

The only thing I struggled with was getting the wake-word config right: I could never find the right balance point where it responded every time, without also having annoying false positives, so I ended up turning it off. It does support multiple wake-word engines; I'm gonna have another go with Picovoice Porcupine now that they're opened up custom wake-word training for free.

I'm most heavily experienced with Rhasspy's sister project, voice2json [1], which I used to build a voice-controlled car jukebox [2], and it's been working fantastically. (It triggers from a Bluetooth remote, so no wake-word issues.) The two projects share the same core engine.

For hardware, Raspberry 3/4 perform quite well, and strong recommend for ReSpeaker [3] for audio (either usb or 4-mic hat).

[0] https://nodered.org/

[1] http://voice2json.org/

[2] https://github.com/lukifer/voicetunes

[3] https://www.seeedstudio.com/category/Speech-Recognition-c-44...

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#44

Post by 0xdeadb00f »

noitpmeder wrote: post #34

Although not exactly what you're looking for, I've heard really interesting things about https://knocki.com/ Essentially you can program your house to coded knocks. Lights/music/door/... all by sequences of knocks.

Actually not a bad idea. Seems pretty DIY-able too.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#45

Post by smoldesu »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #20
fartcannon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all spy. Alexa is just the most obvious. You should get rid of them all.

I hate writing "citation needed", but, citation needed. That's a big claim.

Apple owns up to sending a certain amount of telemetry[0] back home, but we have no way of verifying what it is since the traffic is encrypted. It's impossible to know what data it's collecting and sending back, or even how anonymized that information is. On top of that, Siri invocations are recorded and saved for 6 months, and then retained for an additional 2 years after being dis-associated with your account. Once again, there is no way for us to verify Apple's claims here; we could definitely have another iMessage scenario on our hands where they just keep all that data anyways, and when they're called out on it they simply blame the USA and try to look as powerless as possible. Like the other commenter suggested, it hinges solely on how much you trust a single company. This single company in question is located in the domestic United States, is known to comply with intelligence agencies, and has every reason in the world to kiss up to American authority. I'll let you do the math here.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/homepod-echo-google-hom...

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#46

Post by neetrain »

3a2d29 wrote: post #21

I don't want to sound like a smart ass, but I feel like a good alternative to Alexa is just doing all that yourself. I have never had an Alexa but surely there isn't that much time saved by having it turn off lights. Siri on your iPhone can set alarms and shopping lists and presumably your phone it always around you.

It makes sense, but I never realized how much my brain resources has wasted for finding the remotes for lights and an air conditioner before I tried alexa.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#47

Post by Talanes »

3a2d29 wrote: post #21

I don't want to sound like a smart ass, but I feel like a good alternative to Alexa is just doing all that yourself. I have never had an Alexa but surely there isn't that much time saved by having it turn off lights. Siri on your iPhone can set alarms and shopping lists and presumably your phone it always around you.

The most important function my Alexa serves is acting as the alarm that isn't my phone/requires a separate skill set to disable. Simultaneously talking and manipulating a phone is a magnitude harder to sleep through than just the phone.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#48

Post by colordrops »

ummonk wrote: post #18
colordrops wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terrible suggestion. "Taking Apple's word on it" is not a valid privacy strategy. Companies have shown time and again that they lie about what is happening behind the scenes, or even just change their policies for the worst. Then there are rogue employees, such as the Ubiquiti fiasco, and secret government data collection, such as PRISM, of which Apple was a participant. Apple has broken trust multiple time…

Unless you design your own hardware and build your own fab to manufacture it, you're always taking the word of at least one company.

This is like saying that you might as well be an alcoholic since you smoke cigarettes.

That's why you use VLANs on your home network and open source operating systems on your phone and computers. It reduces attack surface area. It's on your property and you can analyze where data is being sent.

With cloud services, you have no idea what's going on with the data once it is on someone else's servers.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#49

Post by colordrops »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #20
fartcannon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all spy. Alexa is just the most obvious. You should get rid of them all.

I hate writing "citation needed", but, citation needed. That's a big claim.

UFOs, cold fusion, and reptilian overlords are big claims. A company driven by profit with a history of questionable practices doing shady things with data is in no way a big claim. It's happened countless times.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#50

Post by atum47 »

I was working on a solution for that a few years ago with an API for raspberry pi

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/rpiapi

Here you can see I'm using voice commands to drive a car

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/raspberryCar

I mean, with a little bit of code and some 3v relays you can achieve what you want

Post reply on HN