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Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

phoronix.com

41–50 of 79 posts

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#41

I don't understand what Mozilla is. They re-upped the Google deal to the tune of $400-450million/year for the next 3 years, so their revenue is secure. That's great. I can also understand that it makes sense to cut some side-projects that are probably a distraction (and this one may very well fit that category). But if you cut funding to things like MDN, Servo/Rust and move away from Firefox as a core focus (the thin…

Wait, move away from firefox as a core focus ?

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#42

I don't understand what Mozilla is. They re-upped the Google deal to the tune of $400-450million/year for the next 3 years, so their revenue is secure. That's great. I can also understand that it makes sense to cut some side-projects that are probably a distraction (and this one may very well fit that category). But if you cut funding to things like MDN, Servo/Rust and move away from Firefox as a core focus (the thin…

I personally have the feeling that their main focus is on promoting wokeness/social justice in the software industry. They probably claim that their core competency is still browser technology, but I am not so sure when looking at our code and seeing comments like this:

  // Change these to proper private fields once Firefox supports them

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#43
post #3

Semi-related, but does anyone know if Firefox Send is on the chopping block? They took it down before the layoffs due to security concerns, and now I'm worried it won't be coming back online. Every alternative I've been able to find has been either poor quality or too shady for me to ever actually want to use.

I've tried many of the options, and Croc [0] has always worked best for me. I tried Firefox Send, but the downsides were that the entire file had to finish uploading first and a lack of auto-resume. [0] https://github.com/schollz/croc

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#44

My quick test of DeepSpeech, as posted on Facebook back in April: -- I just ran a speech-to-text converter on a very clear clip of former Doctor Who actor Tom Baker talking in an interview. The DeepSpeech converter uses the very latest AI deep-learning advancements to 'listen' to the audio and output the spoken words as text. After 3 long minutes of running it on a 30-second clip, it printed out its interpretation: "…

It's supposed to work on sentence long audio (4 - 5 seconds), they suggest chunking your audio first: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/longer-audio-files-with-deep...

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#45
post #36
post #22

Am I the only one trying to figure out why Mozilla even has a "speech-to-text" team?

The world needs a state of the art and easy to integrate library for providing speech to text so that we don't have to rely on sending all of our voice data to the big tech giants. I imagine this was the motivation behind it. That being said, I think the current open source options are actually okay and constantly getting better. They're certainly a lot better today than they were 3 years ago.

The thing is, good speech to text AI needs good training data. And lots of it. With as little error as possible.

They were also doing this. And made an easy to use website, where you could contribute and people did. I cannot imagine it was soo expensive that they now have to throw it under the bus.

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#46
post #42

I don't understand what Mozilla is. They re-upped the Google deal to the tune of $400-450million/year for the next 3 years, so their revenue is secure. That's great. I can also understand that it makes sense to cut some side-projects that are probably a distraction (and this one may very well fit that category). But if you cut funding to things like MDN, Servo/Rust and move away from Firefox as a core focus (the thin…

I personally have the feeling that their main focus is on promoting wokeness/social justice in the software industry. They probably claim that their core competency is still browser technology, but I am not so sure when looking at our code and seeing comments like this: // Change these to proper private fields once Firefox supports them

The phrase "get woke go broke" comes to mind unfortunatly.

I'm a heavy Firefox user, and have given money to Mozilla in the past, but their leadership has dropped the ball and I'm sorry to say I'm reluctant to give them any more $.

My hope is that they focus efforts on Firefox as an open-web, security and privacy-promoting system (which it does a lot of already). I do think things like Rust have been a distraction, the world doesn't need yet another programming language (compared to Modern C++, Rust doesn't seem worth the effort?).

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#47
post #22

Am I the only one trying to figure out why Mozilla even has a "speech-to-text" team?

You've actually touched on something very important here: Mozilla seems to be getting its fingers into more than it can handle. It wants to do everything but ends up doing a lot of things fairly poorly. I switched away from Firefox to Brave yesterday. Became tired of how Firefox threads would consume 99% of my CPU endlessly until they're manually killed. This happened about four or five times a day, I'd only notice w…

In my experience Chromium does this too (busy spinning threads).

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#48
post #3

Semi-related, but does anyone know if Firefox Send is on the chopping block? They took it down before the layoffs due to security concerns, and now I'm worried it won't be coming back online. Every alternative I've been able to find has been either poor quality or too shady for me to ever actually want to use.

I've mostly heard of people using Magic Wormhole for this https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole Never used it myself

That works great for sending files between my machines or to other technically minded people, but Firefox send was useful to send to others.

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#49
post #6

Seems unlikely. The layoffs happened before they got a new deal: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-f... Now they can bring people back.

Now I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to managing companies so I can't be sure if that is the right move or not. However surely any management that announces massive lay-offs to then turn around and hire those same people back a few weeks later would have to be deemed blatantly incompetent (if not malicious)?

Re: Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

#50

I don't understand what Mozilla is. They re-upped the Google deal to the tune of $400-450million/year for the next 3 years, so their revenue is secure. That's great. I can also understand that it makes sense to cut some side-projects that are probably a distraction (and this one may very well fit that category). But if you cut funding to things like MDN, Servo/Rust and move away from Firefox as a core focus (the thin…

Wait, move away from firefox as a core focus ?

Yeah. From https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...

They list their 5 areas to focus on .. and Firefox isn't mentioned by name anywhere. For example:

"New focus on product. Mozilla must be a world-class, modern, multi-product internet organization. That means diverse, representative, focused on people outside of our walls, solving problems, building new products, engaging with users and doing the magic of mixing tech with our values" (emphasis mine)

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