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Firefox Voice

voice.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Voice

#101

Post by fuzxi »

cpeterso wrote: post #66
lawl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just pushed an update on android on me that disabled all addons except uBO because they don't support them yet, a few hours ago. That was the last straw that broke the camels back for me, after using FF since 1.0. Just rm -rf'd my firefox profile on my desktop a few minutes ago. I've defended them for a long time even if I didn't agree with everything they did, but they're so completely off the rails, enough is…

The new Firefox for Android (aka "Fenix") supports extensions that just uBlock Origin. It supports the following at this time, with more coming soon: uBlock Origin Dark Reader HTTPS Everywhere Privacy Badger NoScript Security Suite Decentraleyes Search by Image YouTube High Definition Privacy Possum https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/07/28/mozillas-next-gen-f...

That's frankly a pathetic list when you consider not only the sum total of available extensions, but the list of Recommended Extensions alone. There's a Github issue for this with one particularly interesting reply: [1]

>Let it be put this way. I have extensions which I can already test while tethered using web-ext. They work. I know they work. But for some reason, Mozilla seems adamantly opposed to letting me test these extensions while not tethered to my computer.

That's from an extension developer who's struggling to test his own extensions.

Based on liuche's comments in that issue, the Fenix team's current stance seems to be, "The latest version disables some of the WebExtension APIs and adds some new ones which may break some extensions, so we're manually testing and approving every extension by ourselves, starting with the Recommended list. Sideloading unapproved extensions will probably never be allowed because of security and performance implications, except maybe on Nightly release."

I'm sure you can guess how well that's going to work out, given that only nine extensions are currently approved after 2+ months.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/11308#issueco...

Re: Firefox Voice

#102

Post by adito »

joecool1029 wrote: post #72
lawl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just pushed an update on android on me that disabled all addons except uBO because they don't support them yet, a few hours ago. That was the last straw that broke the camels back for me, after using FF since 1.0. Just rm -rf'd my firefox profile on my desktop a few minutes ago. I've defended them for a long time even if I didn't agree with everything they did, but they're so completely off the rails, enough is…

>They just pushed an update on android on me that disabled all addons except uBO because they don't support them yet, a few hours ago. It's worse than you thought. You just got the new Fenix browser they've been working on for some time, it's currently on staged rollout to stable channel. Old stable was Fennec and it's getting killed off. I know this because I've sat in their Matrix dev channel until today. I'm not s…

That's first time I heard that, not to mean that I didn't believe you, but what's the exact text you sent that is made them censor and banned you?

Re: Firefox Voice

#103

Post by pbhjpbhj »

setzer22 wrote: post #67
Causality1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writing's been on the wall for a while now. I call it "The Mozilla Shuffle". Power features start out built into the menu. Then they get pushed to settings. Then they go to a key in about:config. Then you have to make the key yourself. Then they start ignoring the key but there's an extension that puts support back. Then the functionality which runs the extension gets disabled but if you're really determined you…

Wow, that's extremely accurate! Disabling the tab bar has also went this exact route (when you use a tiling wm with tabs, some people like to disable browser and terminal tabs as it's redundant) I managed to do it with a combination of two extensions, some about:config flags and userChrome.css some years ago, but it may already be broken by now. Mozilla keeps trying to get to the mainstream market while ignoring its…

They're paid something stupid like 100s of Millions of $USD to direct users to Google, and I understand the CEO was paid by Google (>$1M) though I've not seen good corroboration of that. Bias towards Google is not surprising.

Re: Firefox Voice

#104

Post by joecool1029 »

adito wrote: post #102
joecool1029 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They just pushed an update on android on me that disabled all addons except uBO because they don't support them yet, a few hours ago. It's worse than you thought. You just got the new Fenix browser they've been working on for some time, it's currently on staged rollout to stable channel. Old stable was Fennec and it's getting killed off. I know this because I've sat in their Matrix dev channel until today. I'm not s…

That's first time I heard that, not to mean that I didn't believe you, but what's the exact text you sent that is made them censor and banned you?

Screenshot of the text I sent: https://ibb.co/X5LB4qp

Re: Firefox Voice

#105

Post by AsyncAwait »

bartvk wrote: post #84
djsumdog wrote: post #60

I've looked into open source voice assistants before. I found mycroft, Jarvis and a few others, but either got bogged down in dependencies or configuration. Many supported shipping your data to Google or Amazon if you configured it, or an open source voice recognition tool. I hate this idea that our voice has to be shipped somewhere to be processed. I remember a lot of the speech-to-text tools in the early 2000s were…

Even Apple, with its focus on privacy and local AI, needs an internet connection for most Siri queries.

The HomePod has a relatively powerful CPU for what is doing, I'd assume there's lots of headroom to do local intent recognition on device, but Apple likes to get new training data constantly too, so they haven't really tried.

Re: Firefox Voice

#106

Post by andrenatalbr »

mikob wrote: post #12

I've been working on this exact thing for Chrome the last 3 years: https://www.lipsurf.com Anyone can make an open source plugin for it to do anything with voice ( https://github.com/LipSurf/plugins ) I've wanted to port it to Firefox, but the HTML5 SpeechRecognition API ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechRecog... ) is still not available. Why not just make the API available and leave this in ad…

The Web Speech Api is available in Firefox Nightly behind a prefix. You can enable it this way: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Web_Speech_API_-_Speech_Recognition

Re: Firefox Voice

#107

Post by AsyncAwait »

I see a lot of skeptical voices here, (somewhat warranted, given it's a voice assistant technology), but the fact remains that if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data.

This extension is trying to provide some useful functionality in the hopes that Mozilla gets more data for https://commonvoice.mozilla.org

I'd at least consider recording your voice, especially if you're a non-native English speaker, like myself, have an accent etc.

It took many years for free software to start to take on the smartphone segment, with previous efforts, (including by Mozilla), failing and only now PinePhone & Librem 5 giving it another go, but unless you're a super hardcore enthusiast, you carry an iPhone/Android today.

I see this as a way to push back on the likes of Amazon, Google and Apple with this. If regular Firefox users are able to use an on-device, privacy respecting voice assistance and other open-source projects can use Mozilla's tools and datasets to build compelling competitors to Alexa, I'd see that as proof that free software is able to address new, emerging markets too.

Re: Firefox Voice

#108

Post by scrollaway »

posguy wrote: post #88
Vinnl wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what they are working on, but that needs high-quality training data: https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en This is just another way of gathering that data. (If consented to.)

Mozilla DeepSpeech is trained on about 2000 hours of audio that is mostly spoken by American males. It has little ability to handle noise or accents and has a 5.97% Word Error Rate on LibriVox (which is noiseless, plain spoken english). Meanwhile, Google, Microsoft & IBM have tons of fresh audio coming in constantly to use in augmenting their models. Baidu was able to build a competitive English Speech to Text model…

There's tens of millions of hours of video content out there that has been subtitled pretty well, and I'd wager a lot of it is under usable licenses for Mozilla. Has that been considered?

Re: Firefox Voice

#109

Post by hnarn »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #107

I see a lot of skeptical voices here, (somewhat warranted, given it's a voice assistant technology), but the fact remains that if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. This extension is trying to provide some useful functionality in the hopes that Mozilla gets more data for https://commonvoice.mozilla.org I'd at least consider recording your voice, especially if…

> This extension is trying to provide some useful functionality in the hopes that Mozilla gets more data for https://commonvoice.mozilla.org

This is awesome! I love contributing to open source initiatives like this. I'm also a non-native speaker so hopefully I'll add some color to the voices recorded.

Re: Firefox Voice

#110

Post by [deleted] »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #107

I see a lot of skeptical voices here, (somewhat warranted, given it's a voice assistant technology), but the fact remains that if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. This extension is trying to provide some useful functionality in the hopes that Mozilla gets more data for https://commonvoice.mozilla.org I'd at least consider recording your voice, especially if…

[deleted]
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