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Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

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Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#111

Post by dsteinman »

kingo55 wrote: post #74
ftyers wrote: post #9

Mozilla DeepSpeech trained on the Common Voice dataset for English. You can get pretrained models too. They have a nice matrix channel where you can get help, and pretty good documentation. It is also actively developed by several engineers. http://voice.mozilla.org/en/datasets and http://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/

Interesting. Are there any projects actively using this today?

I've been using DeepSpeech to learn to build voice controls for all sorts of things in JavaScript. And I've got a way to connect it to the web so you'll be able write speech recognition enabled web pages using client side JavaScript.

https://github.com/jaxcore/deepspeech-plugin

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#112

Post by gibs0ns »

I was in the process of planning my multi-room voice-AI setup based on SnipsAI (to be integrated with Home Assistant) when it was announced they were bought by Sonos, which killed their open source project. Since then I have been left trying various projects that meet my needs.

Among those, I tried MyCroft, which still requires a cloud account to config various things on it, and it doesn't support a multi-room setup at this time.

I've since switched to Rhasspy, which offers a larger array of config options and engines, and also multi-room (I'm yet to config multi-room tho)

In the long-term I plan to "train" the voice-AI for various additions, including a custom wake word - No, I'm not calling it `Jarvis` ;)

I'm running each of these voice-AI's on a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB model), though I'm considering switching them to Pi 3's. I'm using the `ReSpeaker 2mic Pi-Hat` on each pi for the mic input. I'm planning to configure all the satellite nodes (voice-AI in each room) to PXE boot, that way they don't require an sd-card and I can easily update their images/configs from a central location.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#113

Post by daanzu »

daanzu wrote: post #107

I develop Kaldi Active Grammar [1], which is mainly intended for use with strict command grammars. Compared to normal language models, these can provide much better accuracy, assuming you can describe (and speak) your command structure exactly. (This is probably more acceptable for a voice assistant for an audience that is more technical.) The grammar can be specified by a FST, or you can use KaldiAG through Dragonfl…

Too late to edit, but I should probably have noted that KaldiAG also would make it easy to define "contexts" when (groups of) commands are active for recognition. For example, if the TV is on, you could have commands for adjusting the volume/etc. But if it is off, those commands are disabled, so they can't be recognized, and further, the engine knows this and can therefore better recognize the other commands that remain active.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#114

Post by OlympusMonds »

gibs0ns wrote: post #112

I was in the process of planning my multi-room voice-AI setup based on SnipsAI (to be integrated with Home Assistant) when it was announced they were bought by Sonos, which killed their open source project. Since then I have been left trying various projects that meet my needs. Among those, I tried MyCroft, which still requires a cloud account to config various things on it, and it doesn't support a multi-room setup…

Is it possible to make your config available, e.g., GitHub?

I'm just starting to get going with Rhasspy, integrating with Home Assistant, and the docs miss just enough that I hit walls everytime I try.

Thanks for the info you've already provided though, sounds like I want exactly what you do.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#115

Post by hutzlibu »

mister_hn wrote: post #25
gok wrote: post #17

Don't bother. The cloud based solutions are so vastly superior to the current non-cloud solutions that unless you're something of an expert in ASR you're just going to get frustrated. If you're worried about privacy, Google lets you pay a little extra to immediately delete the audio after you send it to their servers.

But none is sure that Google does keep a copy of the data. Cloud = giving out your data

And some of us still have those odd privacy concerns ..

But seriously, it feels sometimes, we are very small minority.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#116

Post by Jaruzel »

lucb1e wrote: post #76
romwell wrote: post #28

TL; DR: Win 10 IoT for RasPi does it. ----------------- Windows 10 IoT for Raspberry Pi comes with offline speech recognition API. It was not hard to slap some code together that turns on a light when someone says "banana" at a hackathon. Sounds like exactly what you need. >If it helps I'm happy to reduce vocabulary to a dictionary of words You will do it with an XML grammar file for offline recognition[4]. [1] https…

This is really interesting, but I have a few questions: - The setup guide shows a Windows system making a Windows iot version. Can't I just download an iso and flash it to an sdcard with dd? Does it need a license? - The demo projects show C# and while I can develop in monodevelop, I don't have a Windows to compile it with. Is a C# compiler included in Windows iot's .NET distribution or are there also cross-platform…

So, recently I played with Windows10 IoT.

Win10 IoT is written to the SD card, and left to first-boot inside the Pi (this bit takes AGES). While it's doing that you install the Win IoT dashboard toolkit onto your PC (Windows only). The Dashboard will find your Win10 IoT Pi on the network, there's a few demo apps pre installed you can play with. It's a free OS, but you need to pay for a dev licence if you want it to not reboot every 24 hours. (There's also an on screen non-production warning).

Now you fire up Visual Studio, which has gained the ability to build C# apps on ARM. You write a small app, including using the visual form designer, and you debug using the PC based Win IoT emulator, or you deploy it directly (using VS) to the the Pi.

Once you are happy with your app, you have to bake it into a new OS image that gets written to the SD card(s) for proper deployment.

Win10 IoT can only run one app in the foreground. It does not have a classic desktop, which should be fine for embedded or kiosk type applications.

Personally, I found it clunky and slow, even on a fast Pi. There's also a fair amount of restrictions applied to your app (think the same restrictions as an Android or iOS app) so if you are used to your C# app having full (read) access to the machine it's running on, you won't get that on Win IoT.

If you want to develop GUI rich apps on the Pi, there are far better alternatives (Mono, Python/GTK etc. on Raspbian).

This is just my take on Win10 IoT. I'm a Windows guy by profession so I don't have an anti-MS bias here.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#117

Post by JanisL »

I was one of the maintainers of the Persephone project which is an automated phonetic transcription tool. This came about from a research project that required a non-cloud solution. This project is open source and can be found on GitHub:

https://github.com/persephone-tools

This may be a little too low level for what as there's no language model but maybe it's helpful as part of your system

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#118

Post by barrystaes »

daanzu wrote: post #113
daanzu wrote: post #107

I develop Kaldi Active Grammar [1], which is mainly intended for use with strict command grammars. Compared to normal language models, these can provide much better accuracy, assuming you can describe (and speak) your command structure exactly. (This is probably more acceptable for a voice assistant for an audience that is more technical.) The grammar can be specified by a FST, or you can use KaldiAG through Dragonfl…

Too late to edit, but I should probably have noted that KaldiAG also would make it easy to define "contexts" when (groups of) commands are active for recognition. For example, if the TV is on, you could have commands for adjusting the volume/etc. But if it is off, those commands are disabled, so they can't be recognized, and further, the engine knows this and can therefore better recognize the other commands that rem…

Could Home Assistant use such commands by running a docker?

Also the video demo is rather impressive, in how accurate (and predictable) it recognises.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#119

Post by guptaneil »

rs23296008n1 wrote: post #94
guptaneil wrote: post #65

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Hiome, a smart home startup focused on private by design local-only products. What actions are you looking to handle with the assistant? Reason I ask is because a voice assistant is a command line interface with no auto-complete or visual feedback. It doesn’t scale well as you add more devices or commands to your home, because it becomes impossible to remember all the phrases you progr…

Sure. We've got a house with multiple buildings, including sheds, halls etc. Around 100 people need separate profiles, each should be able to set alarms, timers, reminders, etc. if they want a routine to create any of those or tell them time or date or temperature they should be able to do that from any of the voice assistants in any room. They might only want such a routine in a particular room. They should be able…

That's definitely a new situation we haven't seen before!

Are the 100 people using all of the different rooms, or do people mostly stick to their own rooms (like a hotel/dorm)?

I'd love to see what you've built so far, and better understand the problems you're trying to fix. For example, does each room have its own coffee machine, or is it a communal coffee machine? Are the people living here permanently or rotating regularly? What is the goal for device detection (e.g., do you want to use that for presence detection or as a security system or something else)?

We have a prototype for a machine learning system that learns how you use your devices and then automates them by itself, so you don't have to set anything up. Our focus is lights because that's what most people have, but it can also control other on/off things like curtains or tv right now. It sounds like it could be good fit for a situation like this, and I'd be happy to chat with you more on whether it makes sense to try out!

Can you send me an email (neil@hiome.com)?

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#120

Post by hutzlibu »

ftyers wrote: post #9

Mozilla DeepSpeech trained on the Common Voice dataset for English. You can get pretrained models too. They have a nice matrix channel where you can get help, and pretty good documentation. It is also actively developed by several engineers. http://voice.mozilla.org/en/datasets and http://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/

Here is a paper from a german university, where they tried to adopt DeepSpeech to german:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336532830_German_En...

The results are, that adopting works good, but as of writing of the paper somemonths ago, the results were not very good yet. So it takes better trained models for other languages. English seems to be quite good.

What surprised me, is that it works offline very fast even on a rasperry pi!

https://www.hackster.io/dmitrywat/offline-speech-recognition...

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