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Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

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Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#2

Post by grawprog »

I have to admit, voice assistants don't interest me much, but this looks like a pretty cool start to something that seems to be needed and lacking in the realm of voice assistants.

I'd like to see this gain traction and grow. Just because of the amount of people that seem to use and like voice assistants it's great to see some work on the open source, non-proprietary cloud side of things.

I also have to admit, I find most of thr current voice assistant technology vaguely creepy knowing every command is possibly stored and saved somewhere outside my control. The fact the systems that do this are constantly listening for phrases and of course the inevitable use of your data for marketing that these services are based on.

I understand the choices seem to be either pay for it or pay with your privacy and data, but I still hold out the naive hope for a technology based future focused on empowering individuals and not service providers and large corporations, sadly it seems this mostly comes from the open source world, which as many articles on hn have touched on, don't tend to get the support they need or they get picked up by large entities who take what they need and surround them by proprietary blobs.

Sorry this got a bit rambling, but anyway, this is a cool project, I hope to see it grow and gain support and adoption.

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#3

Post by bussierem »

grawprog wrote: post #2

I have to admit, voice assistants don't interest me much, but this looks like a pretty cool start to something that seems to be needed and lacking in the realm of voice assistants. I'd like to see this gain traction and grow. Just because of the amount of people that seem to use and like voice assistants it's great to see some work on the open source, non-proprietary cloud side of things. I also have to admit, I find…

In response to a few things in your comment:

I was actually in the same opinion as you about remote storage and always on wake detection, and I actually found out that it's possible to make one without all of this!

There are "offline wake work detector libraries" like Snowboy.ai that prevent one of those things, and you can also get self hosted versions of even popular language parsers like the Azure Speech Recognition that you can run in a docker image and have everything stored locally (or not at all!)

Not suggesting you have to go make your own. It just makes me hopeful for the future where we can build useful assistants that don't need all this privacy l-destroying crap in them :)

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#5

Post by livre »

grawprog wrote: post #2

I have to admit, voice assistants don't interest me much, but this looks like a pretty cool start to something that seems to be needed and lacking in the realm of voice assistants. I'd like to see this gain traction and grow. Just because of the amount of people that seem to use and like voice assistants it's great to see some work on the open source, non-proprietary cloud side of things. I also have to admit, I find…

>I understand the choices seem to be either pay for it or pay with your privacy and data

Where have you seen those choices? What I've seen is either pay with your privacy and data (Cortana for example) or pay for it and at the same time surrender your privacy and data (Alexa, Google Nest).

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#7

Post by niels2 »

grawprog wrote: post #2

I have to admit, voice assistants don't interest me much, but this looks like a pretty cool start to something that seems to be needed and lacking in the realm of voice assistants. I'd like to see this gain traction and grow. Just because of the amount of people that seem to use and like voice assistants it's great to see some work on the open source, non-proprietary cloud side of things. I also have to admit, I find…

Hey, you should check out Mycroft AI.

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#8

Post by nwienert »

livre wrote: post #5
grawprog wrote: post #2

I have to admit, voice assistants don't interest me much, but this looks like a pretty cool start to something that seems to be needed and lacking in the realm of voice assistants. I'd like to see this gain traction and grow. Just because of the amount of people that seem to use and like voice assistants it's great to see some work on the open source, non-proprietary cloud side of things. I also have to admit, I find…

>I understand the choices seem to be either pay for it or pay with your privacy and data Where have you seen those choices? What I've seen is either pay with your privacy and data (Cortana for example) or pay for it and at the same time surrender your privacy and data (Alexa, Google Nest).

Siri is more of a pay for it and keep the privacy/data.

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#10

Post by alexdeloy »

oceliker wrote: post #9

I wish somebody made a text-based assistant that has similar functionality. As a non-native English speaker I don't think voice assistants will ever become accurate enough to be usable by me.

I didn't try it out yet but Kalliope is a similar project (RPi voice assistant) but has an API where you could input a text order via HTTP:

https://kalliope-project.github.io/kalliope/api/synapses/#ru...

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