Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox Voice

voice.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 166 posts

Re: Firefox Voice

#111

Post by panpanna »

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…

> if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data.

Fair enough, but is any stopping Mozilla from _also_ selling your voice data to third parties including advertisers and commercial ML interests?

(Asking this because Firefox has started sharing our data with leanplum)

Re: Firefox Voice

#113

Post by AsyncAwait »

panpanna wrote: post #111
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…

> if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. Fair enough, but is any stopping Mozilla from _also_ selling your voice data to third parties including advertisers and commercial ML interests? (Asking this because Firefox has started sharing our data with leanplum)

As long as they're upfront about what they collect and how to not send them data, am fine with it. Obviously opt-in is much proffered to opt-out, but from the Firefox Voice site, it clearly states sharing data is opt-in.

My guess would be there isn't much of a point selling voice data from an open dataset. Also, since the code is in the open, it would be relatively easy to spot if they were sending data to somewhere they do not or record when they shouldn't.

Re: Firefox Voice

#114

Post by sildur »

Causality1 wrote: post #70
setzer22 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Frankly it started going downhill when they jumped headfirst into the version number dick-measuring contest with Chrome. They care about pulling in new users, not keeping old ones. Anything to make a news headline and generate clicks and downloads. Some asshat feature one percent of their users will try one time and then never touch again. Disembowling their feature set to make a benchmark run five percent faster so…

> It makes me so angry. Firefox was the chosen one. It slew the evil giant IE. Then Mr.moneybags Chrome came around and scared Mozilla so shitless they completely forgot why people chose them over IE in the first place. Their solution to every problem is "be more like Chrome while being less like Google".

I totally agree. I feel so powerless watching them fail like that... Google annihilated firefox. Moral lesson here: free software can be destroyed. Not by openly fighting it, like Microsoft, but by rotting it from the core, like Google.

Re: Firefox Voice

#116

Post by Multicomp »

franga2000 wrote: post #83
lawl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, because Firefox on your phone doesn't have X, you deleted it everywhere and installed a browser that... also doesn't have X? No, because Firefox on my phone has removed X, I'm switchting to a browser that's getting X, and where the time-line isn't "we dunno lul". Maybe Brave doesn't hit their timeline, but Mozilla doesn't have one and I have no idea when my stuff will start working again. Until Brave Mobile has…

Except that FF is also getting the feature - according to their timeline around Q4 20 - Q1 21. As many have pointed out, Mozilla updated your glitchy and slow browser with a newer and faster one that unfortunately still isn't at feature parity. They didn't remove the feature in the sense that they abandoned it, it was simply a regression that came with an update they considered more important. I agree it was way too…

I agree with you, hence why I disable the auto update for my Firefox app.

The blessed extensions strategy is one I would have avoided.

Re: Firefox Voice

#117

Post by shock »

lawl wrote: post #40
krick wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Mozilla is not what it used to be. I guess it's just wishful thinking that makes it so easy to forget.

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…

Kiwi Browser on Android supports Chrome extensions. After pushing the Firefox update that disabled my extensions, some of which I use when I buy groceries for recipes (Tap Translate), I am abandoning Mozilla too :(

Makes me sad after using Firefox for as long as I can remember, recommending it to people constantly and insisting that companies I worked at test in Firefox too, but I no longer trust Mozilla to do what's best for me.

Re: Firefox Voice

#118

Post by synesthesiam »

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…

> I found mycroft, Jarvis and a few others, but either got bogged down in dependencies or configuration.

More recently, there is also Rhasspy (https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io) and voice2json (https://voice2json.org). I'm the author of both, if you have questions.

> Why is everything done in "the cloud."

Besides being a way of collecting data and ultimately making money, it avoids some of the "bogged down in dependencies or configuration" problem. My voice projects need to run entirely offline on a variety of hardware and operating systems. If each client was just a little app piping audio data to a cloud service, it would be way easier to write and maintain.

> So the only way to semi-accurately do voice recognition is to source algorithms that re-train off of millions of people?

Nope. You can absolutely tune a speech model locally on your own samples and get great accuracy. The trouble comes with open-ended speech: people expect the voice assistant to recognize that new artist or movie they heard about yesterday. That doesn't work without upkeep somewhere.

Rhasspy/voice2json are intended for pre-defined voice commands using a template language. You can get almost perfect accuracy with this approach, even with millions of possible commands. Re-training only takes a minute, so personal upkeep isn't bad.

> Even if it meant I needed to download a 230GB data set, I'd gladly do it, if it could remotely help in getting away from these data silos.

It's a lot less than that; at most 1-2GB for a given language, usually a few 100MB: https://github.com/synesthesiam/voice2json-profiles/

Re: Firefox Voice

#119

Post by shock »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #74
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…

So what do you use now?

Not OP, but Kiwi Browser supports Chrome extensions.

Re: Firefox Voice

#120

Post by shock »

franga2000 wrote: post #83
lawl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, because Firefox on your phone doesn't have X, you deleted it everywhere and installed a browser that... also doesn't have X? No, because Firefox on my phone has removed X, I'm switchting to a browser that's getting X, and where the time-line isn't "we dunno lul". Maybe Brave doesn't hit their timeline, but Mozilla doesn't have one and I have no idea when my stuff will start working again. Until Brave Mobile has…

Except that FF is also getting the feature - according to their timeline around Q4 20 - Q1 21. As many have pointed out, Mozilla updated your glitchy and slow browser with a newer and faster one that unfortunately still isn't at feature parity. They didn't remove the feature in the sense that they abandoned it, it was simply a regression that came with an update they considered more important. I agree it was way too…

> As many have pointed out, Mozilla updated your glitchy and slow browser with a newer and faster one

I don't need Mozilla to make my decisions for me.

Post reply on HN