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Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

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Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#11

Post by grawprog »

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).

Sorry I guess I should have meant theoretical choices...at this point there isn't much of a choice.

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#14

Post by lukifer »

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 use voice2json on my homebrew RPi voice rig, and it has a plain-text input mode [0]. With a little Node-RED + MQTT + shell magic, it's pretty neat/convenient to type into the terminal: `house "turn on lamp"`. :)

[0] https://voice2json.org/commands.html#recognize-intent

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#15

Post by iamsrp »

mvellandi wrote: post #13

Cool project! Is the name perhaps inspired by either: 1) The kids cartoon scientist with a lab, or 2) The Miami homicide bloodsplatter specialist moonlighting renegade serial killer?

It's actually a pun: Dexter, as in the Latin for "right", as in your right hand. Bad I know.

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#16

Post by iamsrp »

Buckaroo9 wrote: post #12

How is this different from previous voice assistant projects designed for the raspberry pi. Projects such as: Rhaspy, Mycroft, and Jasper?

It was mainly a toy project for me; a bone to chew on if you will. I wanted something which I could mess with easily myself and which was heavily pluggable.

Integrating it with various external peripherals should be easy and it's designed to run completely on its own (i.e. no cloud for a lot of things).

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#19

Post by iamsrp »

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.

Dexter has a couple of different input systems: PocketSphinx and DeepSpeech.

PocketSphinx seems to have better language coverage but lower accuracy than DeepSpeech, which only has English and Mandarin Chinese.

DeepSpeech was not great about 2 years ago when I first started Dexter and, being a Brit, I had to fake an (awful) American accent to make it work. It's come on well in that time though; I can use my own voice now, which is a relief to those near by. No clue how good its Mandarin recognition is however.

Other folks in surrounding threads have flagged Kaldi which I'll try to take a look at as well (though it also looks to be only English and Mandarin too).

Re: Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant

#20

Post by iamsrp »

suyash wrote: post #6

Nice one but how is it different than so many other Raspberry Pi based voice assistants?

I added a "Related work" section to the README. It's a tad vacuous since, really, these things are all pretty similar. Dexter can do things with swirly lights though. Swirly lights are cool.
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