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Mycroft – open source voice assistant

mycroft.ai

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Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#101

Post by dljsjr »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #95
shagie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples devices are smarter. This makes them cost more for the "same" hardware, but costs less for the computation. Apple isn't trying to make money with Siri. It's using Siri to make its ecosystem of Apple Music and similar more valuable to its customers. The limits that Apple puts on what it can do makes that cloud side computation less expensive. --- Consider that bit - less expensive. Apple doesn't run its own clo…

I don't think Apple is smarter. Siri is really basic. I can't even say "Turn on the lights and the fan". I have to present it all in bite-sized chunks. Come on how hard is that. I have a feeling there is no AI in these supposedly intelligent assistants. Only scripted stuff.

I don't know if it's device specific but I use "Hey Siri, turn on the overhead lights and the floor lamp" for example all the time. I have a HomePod though.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#102

Post by one-another-dev »

shagie wrote: post #93
arbol wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pi isn't really fast enough to process the speech in real time. deepspeech by mozilla was cited as an offline alternative to the Google speech API but it's difficult to set up with Mycroft and doesn't work very well (lack of data and lag - https://mycroft.ai/voice-mycroft-ai/ ). Because of this, Mozilla set up Common Voice ( https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en ) to help build open datasets of voice recordings.

> The pi isn't really fast enough to process the speech in real time. If you've got an iPhone... put it in to airplane mode so that it is local only. You'll note that Siri no longer works when you do this. However... open up the notes app and tap the microphone. Do some interesting text... > Mister Smith said that he wanted a two by four and half of a pie. (if you don't have an iDevice, it transcribes this as: > Mr.…

> If you've got an iPhone... put it in to airplane mode so that it is local only. You'll note that Siri no longer works when you do this

This is not true anymore. Latest iPhone models have offline Siri working to some extent

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#103

Post by GekkePrutser »

dljsjr wrote: post #101
GekkePrutser wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Apple is smarter. Siri is really basic. I can't even say "Turn on the lights and the fan". I have to present it all in bite-sized chunks. Come on how hard is that. I have a feeling there is no AI in these supposedly intelligent assistants. Only scripted stuff.

I don't know if it's device specific but I use "Hey Siri, turn on the overhead lights and the floor lamp" for example all the time. I have a HomePod though.

Weird, I have a homepod (mini) also. In fact I hardly have any Apple stuff anymore, I only got homepods because it was the most privacy-friendly option out of the big three. I just have an iPad from work which I used to set them up. And most of my automation goes through Home Assistant anyway.

When I give a double command Siri literally tells me she can't do two things at the same time and I have to present them as two separate commands.

Perhaps it's because I have it set to UK English? Perhaps it's smarter in US English. I'll have to try that.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#104

Post by adam1028 »

rickoooooo wrote: post #59
veidr wrote: post #11

Would love to read about experiences actually using this (I mean Mycroft in general) — good, bad, or otherwise. Also, though: why don't we have "text assistants"? Seems to me the process of deciphering spoken text is (or should be) entirely orthogonal to performing the actual task — changing the lighting, cranking up the AC/heat, arming the security perimeter, or whatever. I think the reason is that voice recognition…

I played with Mycroft about two years ago. I had been using a couple Google home minis for a while for the usual things (play spotify, set timers, ask the weather, control lights around the hose). They worked perfectly for that. At the time I decided to de-Google my life and take back my privacy so I went looking for something open source that would provide me more control of my data. I found Mycroft and played with…

I gave up on mycroft after a long wait and built my own with respeaker and picovoice. i have 2 of them with different wake words. imo it's way better and easier than snowboy. i dont understand why people give their data to amazon to set a timer :)

check their free stuff: https://picovoice.ai/pricing/

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#105

Post by paulryanrogers »

LVDOVICVS wrote: post #80
cupofpython wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they both work, I got an echo (alexa) for free and use it for home assistant. It only works when I have an internet connection. So when my internet is out, I cannot turn my lights on/off with it. I understand why, but i too would REALLY like to just have all functionality dependencies for home automation to be local.

I use Mycroft with the home assistant vm running on Proxmox. I’m surprised how easily they integrate. And when the internet goes out I can locally control things from a laptop.

> And when the internet goes out I can locally control things from a laptop.

While an improvement I don't want a cloud-dependent system except where it's unavoidable: like having it read me news.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#106

Post by walterbell »

Is there a good, affordable, open-ish dev platform with an array of far-field microphones? If not, would it be possible to teardown an Amazon Echo Dot and attach their microphone array to an ODROID Arm SBC? Might depend on whether the Alexa microphone array is using a dedicated audio processor chip for echo cancellation.

A web search finds this 4-mike array for $63, https://www.robotshop.com/en/seeedstudio-respeaker-mic-array...

Google had an audio dev kits for schools based on their TPU and RPi, https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice/

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#107

Post by cupofpython »

LVDOVICVS wrote: post #80
cupofpython wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they both work, I got an echo (alexa) for free and use it for home assistant. It only works when I have an internet connection. So when my internet is out, I cannot turn my lights on/off with it. I understand why, but i too would REALLY like to just have all functionality dependencies for home automation to be local.

I use Mycroft with the home assistant vm running on Proxmox. I’m surprised how easily they integrate. And when the internet goes out I can locally control things from a laptop.

I'll have to check out the specifics - but your full setup does not seem like an improvement for me. If alexa is down, I can open up the app on my phone for each smart device manufacturer and manually control things that way. They only need my local wifi network to be functional, internet access not needed.

Can a raspberry pi handle the server functionality I wonder?

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#108

Post by borissk »

I hope this project makes into people's homes, but I really doubt it. Google invests so much resources into their Assistant (a recruiter recently told me they have over 1000 vacancies). Given that Google has it's own very advanced and very efficient cloud infrastructure, their own ML processors and an army of devs and AI scientists, their assistant will always be cheaper and "smarter" than a device build by a small company on top of an open source project.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#109

Post by nottorp »

smoldesu wrote: post #79
Tagbert wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple makes money from the devices it sells. Siri makes those devices more convenient to use. Amazon is selling the devices at or below cost and hoping that Alexa will make the money (which it doesn’t)

That only tells me which one will exist longer, not that "Apple's plan works". I've genuinely seen zero people deliberately use Siri (on iPhone or Mac) over the past 5 years. Apple is certainly losing money on Siri too.

I was one of those zero people until i realized i can tell Siri "add an appointment with Blahblah next tuesday at 11", it will actually understand that and it takes less time than using the calendar interface.

I'm sure enough people find some small use for the voice commands that it's a good feature to have on the phones.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#110

Post by nottorp »

xrd wrote: post #29

I have one of these devices. I'm still a bit mystified about what I want to use it for. But, after reading these threads, I've now got a few ideas that make me very excited. I have come to despise the Google/Alexa/Siri devices. I'll explain why. I hate that Google Home devices always give you a direct answer when you ask a question. The reason I hate this is because my kids use it to get an answer, without any work,…

> I hate that Google Home devices always give you a direct answer when you ask a question.

So does StackOverflow. Teaching people how to do things instead of giving them code ready to copy paste is frowned upon there as well.

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