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Google Home

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Re: Google Home

#191

Post by pbnjay »

hiddencost wrote: post #137
pbnjay wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"OK Google", Google Now, their voice recognition tech, and NLP recognition are far far past Echo's version. So if the hardware is that easy this should have been out yesterday. The even mentioned earlier in the keynote how they've been training it Google assistant with background noise.

Speech recognition is a lot harder than you'd think, and the problems of far field speech recognition especially. All of google's in-house ASR (and wakeword) has been dedicated to near-field devices. Speech is not a "solve it once and it works everywhere" kind of problem. I would ballpark that Google needed to collect 10k hours of _far-field_ speech to train this to a level that was acceptable for the enormous variet…

Sure I understand, but my point is that they should be ahead of the game on basically everything else. Echo was released over a year ago so surely Google has been working on far-field tech since _at least_ then.

To still be aiming for end of year seems like some serious missteps and catch-up going on.

Re: Google Home

#192

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

vox_mollis wrote: post #11
free2rhyme214 wrote: post #10

Competition against Amazon Echo is always positive for consumers.

Perhaps, but bear in mind that Google is a PRISM partner, whereas Amazon is not. The NSA will likely record every sound from your house, if you own this. Edit: Downvoters, please educate me on where I am wrong. Thanks.

those documents are half a decade old. im sure amazon is as well now.

Re: Google Home

#193

Post by notatoad »

noonespecial wrote: post #120
cheald wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. And I recognize the hypocrisy of that. I think the difference for me is that my phone isn't a permanent fixture in my house - it's not explicitly a surveillance device. Echo/Home are explicitly audio surveillance devices, though ostensibly benevolent in their design. I can stick my phone in a Faraday bag easily enough if I want to. I guess what it comes down to is that while I recognize that I sacrifice a measu…

Its not that I don't think that Google and Amazon are probably acting in my best interests now . They probably are. Also not that I think that the government couldn't spy on me if they wanted to. They could. The scenario that worries me is that years from now, Google and Amazon may be coerced into turning over what I said yesterday to a corrupt government fishing through the past for word-crime. And boy-howdy, it tur…

>The scenario that worries me is that years from now, Google and Amazon may be coerced into turning over what I said yesterday

Amazon has said that they're only recording what happens after the hotword is triggered. That's why they can't do custom hotwords - listening for "hey alexa" is built right into the hardware and it doesn't do anything until it hears that. Unless they're flat-out lying, they can't provide any information about what you said yesterday to anybody because they don't have that data.

Re: Google Home

#195

Post by swalsh »

jluk wrote: post #63
swalsh wrote: post #40

As somoene who runs a small ecommerce company i'm really hoping the next platform is open, and not owned by Amazon (or Google). I sell products where purchasing them would be fantastic via a voice interface. If Amazon owns it though, there's no way I'm going to get any fraction of that business. The ownership of these voice platforms is a huge risk for market competition. The voice interface naturally lends itself to…

Sounds like what happened with messaging platforms in China. WeChat became the single bundled platform for mobile and thus got to play kingmaker with default service providers. I agree with your opinion, although it feels like a natural progression as the sheer number of services grows at a rapid pace and its the attempt to remove friction built up from the excessive overhead of choice.

That "excessive overhead of choice" is what allows capitalism to function properly.

Re: Google Home

#196

Post by CaptSpify »

mbrock wrote: post #156
scrollaway wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you make it self-hosted without making it suck? High quality voice recognition in a small box doesn't seem to be a thing that's even remotely possible today, let alone the query processing and knowledge database that comes with it. You could build this on a pi with a mic, speakers, some foss stt and tts engines and some basic training data. But it'll suck.

Hey, people with experience in speech recognition, please chime in! Just the other day I was looking at CMU's Sphinx project for speech recognition. It seems quite capable, even of building something like this Google thing, but I haven't tried to actually use it. Large-vocabulary recognition probably needs something better than a Raspberry Pi... so, just use a more powerful CPU. Yes, Google has an incomprehensibly en…

I have an RPI running Sphinx. It's OK, not great. The biggest issue I have is that you have to pre-define commands.

Re: Google Home

#197

Post by sdegutis »

cheald wrote: post #19

When I was younger, I dreamed of something like this. Voice control for my home! A Star Trek computer that I can interact with conversationally! I just say what I want and it happens! Now, I just see an internet-connected microphone in a software black box which I can only interpret as a giant frickin' security liability. I want this, but unless it's open source top-to-bottom, I won't ever actually put one in my home…

You know, I feel the opposite.

When I was younger, I wanted the same thing. To be kind of like Tony Stark in Iron Man, with all the convenience and power that future technology seems to promise.

But now that I'm old and boring, I'm perfectly happy with my non-futuristic life. We still have an iPhone 3G which we use as an iPod around the house (which we plug into our speakers the old fashioned way, by plugging one end of a headset cord into the iPhone and the other into the speaker's AUX jack), and we have our laptop computer which we use for facebook and reddit.

And that's the most "futuristic" technology I care to have. I don't plan to buy a VR headset. I take notes with a pen and paper when I'm not at my computer. We still write our grocery lists down that way and mark them off in the store with a pen.

It may be boring and un-futuristic, but it gets the job done just fine, and I really don't have any complaints. I'm probably in a tiny minority on HN though.

Re: Google Home

#198

Post by L_Rahman »

izolate wrote: post #6

Looks like something that should've been under the Nest brand. Whatever happened to that?

Nest and Tony Fadell have a deeply product oriented philosophy - they clearly define what their product do and then go iterate till they get to the most aesthetically appealing, polished thing and release. Fadell brought that way of thinking with him from Apple, and from everything that's been published about his management style he's been able to sustain that attitude at Alphabet.

Home or any other AI/machine learning driven product needs to take a much more iterative approach. With those products you start by defining your platform goals and release that. Your product gets better through invisible improvements in your backend, not in the physical thing you sell to people. It makes sense that this product belong to the same team that built Chromecast.

Re: Google Home

#199

Post by frik »

Google, thanks for shutting down Freebase.com on 2 May 2016. By taking it offline, and using it (Knowledge Graph) for Google Home you effectively locked out all competitors. WikiData is a far cry and a fraction of the size of what was Freebase.

Freebase was a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of data composed mainly by its community members. It was an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual, user-submitted wiki contributions. Freebase aimed to create a global resource that allowed people (and machines) to access common information more effectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase

Google is using a lot of data collaborative collected data from closed Freebase and Wikipedia without giving it back.

Re: Google Home

#200

Post by CaptSpify »

protomikron wrote: post #173

Ok, controversial opinion: "[...] and manage everyday tasks" What exactly do we want to automate at home? I think this whole home automation and smart home stuff is complete bullshit. Obviously there are some nice things, like "play me song xyz", but IMHO it is completely oversold. There are just not that much things to automate at home. And this does not mean that I think 640K are enough memory for everyone.

* add $thing to the grocery list

* order more $thing

* schedule an appointment with (doctor|vet|dentist)

* start the dishwasher at 4 P.M.

* turn on the oven when I get home

etc. Just because you can't think of how it will benefit you doesn't mean it's bullshit.

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