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Google Home

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Re: Google Home

#341

Post by supster »

Kluny wrote: post #288
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.

I want my bathroom and my dishes to clean themselves. That's all. Nothing else is onerous.

laundry would be great too :-)

Re: Google Home

#342

Post by machbio »

Hope this is not as disappointing as Onhub, it would be helpful if they have a rich api to start with and not promise that the APIs are coming later...

Re: Google Home

#343

Post by scrollaway »

highwind wrote: post #334
TeMPOraL wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten years ago I played with Microsoft Speech API - which was completely off-line and trained off your voice. In restricted grammar mode, it worked flawlessly - I built a music control application on it, and utilized it like you would use Amazon Echo - I just said "computer, volume, three quarters" from any place in the room, and the loud music turned down a notch. Etc. That was ten years ago , with a crappy electret…

> I'm not buying you couldn't make a decent, self-contained, off-line speech recognition system. I agree. It's not a problem of technology, it's a problem of incentive. There's no money in developing self-contained, off-line speech recognition system, unfortunately.

> There's no money in developing self-contained, off-line speech recognition system

Nonsense. Self-hosting is highly valued in the enterprise sector. But we're not talking about the sort of products that could be sold to consumers for a few hundred dollars here.

Re: Google Home

#344

Post by rtkwe »

hayleox wrote: post #141
t0mbstone wrote: post #32

Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform... I want to be able to control my Apple TV with my Google Home device. I want to be able to control my Phillips Hue and LiFX bulbs. I want to be able to build my own custom home automation server endpoints and point my Google Home commands at them. I want to be able to remote start my car with a voice command. I want to be able to control my Harmony re…

According to Ars Technica, Google Home is actually gonna be more locked down than Amazon Echo. > Initially, Google says that it will not be creating APIs for Assistant and Home and that as such, any integrations with services and other devices will have to come from Google first. This approach is a contrast with the Echo, which is designed to be extensible. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/google-assistant-and…

The key word there is initially. Echo didn't have an SDK when it was first released either neither did Google Now for a while. That's Google's MO for new services and APIs, limited initial release to iron out the bugs and not flood with low effort apps/services.

Re: Google Home

#345

Post by exodust »

That page is so simple, yet even Google devs are "powering" these simple pages with multiple JS files. Why? Is it laziness? Or just some belief that Angular is required now for even "hello world"?

When viewing source I initially thought 'great, a nice clean HTML page'... after all, it's just 3 images fading between each other and a simple form.

But then at the bottom we see Angular, Angular Animate, Angular Scroll, and a fourth Main JS file. Way to set an example Google.

Re: Google Home

#347

Post by eridius »

tree_of_item wrote: post #231
eridius wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Android (though I assume it works the same way), but iPhone's "Hey Siri" is done entirely on-device, so until you activate Siri, nothing you say is sent to a server.

People keep bringing this up and it's silly. It can just record what you say and send it later.

It makes literally no sense for the Hey Siri functionality to do that. This is just a very slightly altered version of "it's an internet-enabled device with a microphone, it could be hacked and told to turn on its microphone remotely", which is a legitimate, if fairly paranoid, complaint that applies to all such devices, even fully open-source and open-hardware ones.

Re: Google Home

#348

Post by dgacmu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #160
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.

Ten years ago I played with Microsoft Speech API - which was completely off-line and trained off your voice. In restricted grammar mode, it worked flawlessly - I built a music control application on it, and utilized it like you would use Amazon Echo - I just said "computer, volume, three quarters" from any place in the room, and the loud music turned down a notch. Etc. That was ten years ago , with a crappy electret…

"In restricted grammar mode"

That's a key limitation, though.

But we're getting close to the point where you can do some of this. For example - http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.03185.pdf - LSTM speech recognition running on a Nexus 5.

The more serious problem with this is that it's going to be expensive -- and somewhat wasteful. There's a lot of pressure to keep consumer devices as cheap as possible, and the cloud is an awesome way to do that. Having shared cloud-based infrastructure for the speech recognition as opposed to putting it into every device (even though it's only used for ~5 minutes every day) is probably a lot cheaper. Consider the hardware in an Amazon Echo:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Teardown/33953

256MB DRAM and a TI DSP: http://www.ti.com/product/dm3725 with a single Cortex-A8 core (about $23 + a smidgeon for the dram)

vs. a Nexus 5 (2GB DRAM, 4 core 2.2Ghz Krait 400) -- the N5 has roughly 8x the DRAM and compute of the CPU in the Echo.

Would you pay an extra $150 for a LocalEcho that still had to send most of your queries to a search engine for resolution, or to a cloud music service for music? (You & I might, but most consumers wouldn't.)

Re: Google Home

#349

Post by reitanqild »

chongli wrote: post #307
TeMPOraL wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The current trend of outsourcing everything to "the cloud" is partially fashion, partially laziness, and mostly dictated by business models - why do something the right way (from engineering point of view), when you can lock your users up in your own garden and extract rent (either directly, or by spamming them with ads and selling their data)? Our devices have incredible amount of computing power now - a gr…

The problem is that our devices are locked up behind NAT routers and IPv6 is starting to resemble fusion power in terms of its ETA. The future of all of our devices having extremely fast connections existing in a world of amazing, free, peer-to-peer applications still seems so far away.

FWIW it seems ipv6 is working (for some definition of working) at my house now :-)

Re: Google Home

#350

Post by __jal »

angryasian wrote: post #308
__jal wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making a mighty fine distinction, one that sometimes makes no difference. You are also assuming that "access to attention" is perfectly firewalled from data, which it isn't. I know one person who is playing with what correlations can be made by getting people to click on google ads. I can't imagine he's the first. You are also assuming that Google's policy will never change, Google's assets will never end up…

the original commenter said they "sell personal data". Yes this is nonsense. Yes every company is susceptible to breaches and every company has the ability to change TOS in the future. Not to belittle you but the only way to protect yourself is to live completely off the grid. As to the person, correlations != direct persons personal data.

No fears; I don't find it the least bit belittling when people assert factually incorrect things.

I don't know what you mean by "direct persons personal data". If it is supposed to mean that correlations don't reveal information that people would prefer to be kept private, either in general or specifically about my friend's results with Google ads, well, that's also wrong. I'm getting the feeling, though, that this is becoming unproductive.

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