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Firefox Voice

voice.mozilla.org

1–10 of 166 posts

Re: Firefox Voice

#3
Interesting concept but I don't think it is practical in an open office environment when you sit next to your colleagues and speak to your browser.

Re: Firefox Voice

#4
Everytime I use a voice interface I regret it. The only time it works is when I ask Google a single short six-grade-level question when nobody else is in the room talking, and I'm not otherwise occupied by anything that would prevent me from just using my phone. I get that there are some people who can't use their thumbs, and I pity those people because voice interfaces are the most frustrating things on this planet.

Why isn't Firefox implementing PWA features like the Share Target API instead of shaving this yak?

Re: Firefox Voice

#5

Everytime I use a voice interface I regret it. The only time it works is when I ask Google a single short six-grade-level question when nobody else is in the room talking, and I'm not otherwise occupied by anything that would prevent me from just using my phone. I get that there are some people who can't use their thumbs, and I pity those people because voice interfaces are the most frustrating things on this planet.…

You are being unfair to yak shaving there, which is normally something you do unrelated but to help you get the original goal done.

Re: Firefox Voice

#6
post #2

I'm surprised by how well the stt work for me as a non native English speaker. I hope to see more products that uses Common Voice.

It seems that they are not quite there yet.

From the FAQ: "Voicefill sends the audio to Google’s Speech-to-Text engine, which returns transcribed text. [...] In the future, we expect to enable Mozilla’s own technology for Speech-to-Text [...]"

Re: Firefox Voice

#7
I don't use voice assistants so I don't know if these are common, but some of the examples in the list of commands[0] are interesting.

>Ask about a webpage - Display or open information to the current page or website.

>Example - What are people saying about this page? (Opens Reddit comments for a specific webpage or article) - What did this page used to look like? (Shows page history in archive.org)

---

>Giving commands nicknames (experimental) - Create names or shortcuts for actions.

> Example - Say "open new york times", then "Give that the name news" - news (will open nytimes.com)

[0] https://mozilla-extensions.github.io/firefox-voice/lexicon.h...

Re: Firefox Voice

#8
> Audio from your voice request is sent to Mozilla’s Voicefill server without any personally identifiable metadata.

> Voicefill sends the audio to Google’s Speech-to-Text engine, which returns transcribed text. We’ve instructed the Google Speech-to-Text engine to NOT save any recordings. Note: In the future, we expect to enable Mozilla’s own technology for Speech-to-Text which enables us to stop using Google’s Speech-to-Text engine.

I was kind of hoping their homegrown speech-to-text engine had become good enough for production use. Disappointing to see that they still have to rely on Google.

Re: Firefox Voice

#10

Speech to text in the cloud is a hard no from me. Especially if it’s Google’s speech to text.

Don't worry, it says they asked Google to not save everyone's voices!

On a serious note, it does bother me how much Mozilla constantly uses Google, even when they have their own solutions They could easily choose not to, especially with their massive budget, but often don't. They have their own Voice API, but they use Google's. They have their own location API, but they use Google's ('use my location' sends your info to Google in Firefox). They have thrown Google analytics into browser components before, and used it on their own websites.

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