Mycroft – open source voice assistant

I really liked the idea from an earlier post with continuous recording + Whisper for transcription + keyword based actions. The drawback is asynchronous execution of your actions, but that setup seems very flexible!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608437

The "voice assistant space" also includes Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, so it's not going anywhere.

I'd contend that it's absolutely not a solution in search of a problem; it's much more of an unsolved problem, and a big part of the "why" is

- voice recognition/assistance tech still maturing

- major players are insisting that the tech supports their walled gardens

- price points are still a problem

The last two creates a conundrum: a lot of times tech prices come down by selling expensive stuff to rich people until the hardware becomes commoditized. But for a good voice assistant, you need a lot of up-front investment at scale. Unfortunately, the companies that are able to do this are also controlling the hardware that can use it, which limits its ability to spread and be useful.

This is why I think Mycroft is important to support:

1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors

2. Part of Mycroft's pitch to businesses is that they can make custom solutions. There are probably a thousand big businesses that might want to get into this space but don't want to rely on Amazon because they want to control the experience and not give up their data. Maybe Target wants to stick virtual assistants around their stores, or maybe a hospital wants to give tools for surgeons.

I also think there's an opportunity for voice control in home stereo, where someone decouples the speakers from everything else. It's still annoying to work with Bluetooth in 2022, and Sonos is still pricey, and another walled garden. I'd love to have a simple controller that connects a dumb speaker to Wi-Fi and lets me voice-control it to play music from a library of my choosing. That's not a thing yet, right?

A lot of assistant functionality is just getting data from the internet, which search engines already know how to present and format in a useful way.

If you need to go to a specific spot in the house to write some text that turns on a light it seems easier to just walk to an actual light switch? For general automation then I think there are some visual block-based configurators to set up triggers for smart appliances otherwise.

With all due respect, I find that thesis absurd.

Maybe you meant it like, "the voice assistant space isn't going to generate huge profits, and thus giant corporations will lose interest".

But even that is absurd. They will still have to do it as a loss leader. Maybe not Amazon — because they just ship us our toilet paper and protein bars and shit. They don't have an "ecosystem" (although they gave it a halfhearted try a few times).

But the chance that in 2032 people just like... don't have voice assistants? It's literally zero, barring an actual WWIII cataclysm reversion-to-barbarism event.

> doesn't work as well as people were hoping

Nothing does, until it does...

> little monetization

Yep, that might be right. But it doesn't necessarily mean the space is "dying". Just that it might not be amenable to oligopolization.

A truly open platform stands a chance in the voice assistant space, as it could be adapted into forms that are useful beyond their current limited designs. Such useful forms probably are not as monetizeable as the current incarnations that invasively collect information about you and your family, so I very much doubt the big tech players will ever attempt to build these useful systems directly.

Unfortunately, Mycroft is not very open itself. Sure, most of the code is open and available, but I tried to contribute and found my PRs ignored for weeks. When they were finally ready to merge them, their poor response cause me to lose interest in the project. At that time, they did not seem interested in cultivating a strong developer community around their core technology components; they were doing their thing, and they wanted the community to implement “skills”. I got the impression that community could either get on board or stand aside and watch them work. For that reason alone, I feel fairly certain that this project will fail eventually as well, and their hardware will become yet another high-tech relic of a paperweight.

As a formerly enthusiastic kickstarter backer, I cannot recommend the Mycroft project as the basis for a product; you don’t own and can’t control the platform on any meaningful way (short of forking it). It might be a better choice than a closed platform, but not enough to make me want to put any money in it.