61–70 of 79 posts
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> Mozilla was the right sponsor for the development of that language, but nobody else was there. Which may indicate that the world really doesn't need another programming language.
I take your point and you may be right. I don't do a lot of C++ development, so I can't speak from first-hand experience if Modern C++ makes Rust superfluous.
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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.
I agree with you, their common voice project is extremely important. From the outside it seems like the engineering effort behind this is done -- They just need to keep the site running to keep collecting data. Actually, now that I think about it, validating the data might be a lot of man hours. I very much hope they don't abandon it, the common voice project is arguably more important than their speech to text engin…
It totally is and therefore also a very good crowdsourced project. And they set up already a nice website with badges and other things motivating people to contribute. Daily 15 minutes of a lot of people would mean lots of validated data. Because with user accounts you can also validate userquality etc.
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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…
> Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this.
They follow up on this by saying that they need to go BEYOND the browser but it doesn't mean that they want to drop it.
But well...you never know with that hollow techmarketing talk...
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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 second sentence of the article you linked is: > Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this. They follow up on this by saying that they need to go BEYOND the browser but it doesn't mean that they want to drop it. But well...you never know with that hollow techmarketing talk...
I wasn't trying to suggest there was no mention of Firefox in their roadmap blog - though it is telling that the Firefox mention you pointed to is in context of an argument for developing non-Firefox products. Nor was I arguing that they will drop Firefox. Even if they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to because Firefox is their sole revenue driver and the only thing that gives them a seat at the table for developing open-standards.
To me the telling part was when they listed their five areas of focus, and Firefox was not one of them.
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: "…
Besides the hypothesis that DS sucks, the software could also very well be just fine and you made methodological errors.
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...
I found that the language model they supplied was trained data that did not contain the words I needed, and got significantly improved results when making my own language model using the kenlm[1] tools.
This (text to speech) breaks pulse audio on my machine every time I enable reader view. Even if I'm not using text to speech or listening to anything else, I'll get a whiny noise until I restart pulse.
What I cannot confirm is the relation of this to the speech-to-text engine. Reader mode most likely utilizes text to speech.
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
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.
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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
Plucking a single comment entirely out of context and presenting it as damning evidence against an entire company's competency feels kind of over the top.