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Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

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Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#12
If you don't mind getting your hands dirty a bit, I think Nvidia's model [Jasper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.03288.pdf) is near SOTA, and they have [pretrained models](https://ngc.nvidia.com/catalog/models/nvidia:jaspernet10x5dr) and [tutorials / scripts](https://nvidia.github.io/NeMo/asr/tutorial.html) freely available. The first is in their library "nemo", but they also have it available in [vanilla Pytorch](https://github.com/NVIDIA/DeepLearningExamples/tree/master/P...) as well.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#13

I've had some good experience with https://snips.ai . Works like advertised. easy to implement. Hardest thing was getting the microphone and the pie to get along.

Did you visit the website lately? Doesn't seem to be an option anymore :-/

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#14

Have you considered the Almond integration for Home Assistant? ( https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/almond/ ) Alternatively, you could just fork the Almond project directly and take it from there: https://github.com/stanford-oval/almond-cloud

No I hadn't. This was why I asked: I know there's alternatives out there but there's so much noise. Thanks.

Almond has been posted on HN previously[1]. User voltagex_ commented[2] that self-hosting, while possible is not recommended in the official installation instructions[3] as it is considered significantly more challenging to manage. This may or may not effect your decision to go forward with Almond.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532003

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534793

[3] https://github.com/stanford-oval/almond-cloud/blob/master/do...

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#15

I've had some good experience with https://snips.ai . Works like advertised. easy to implement. Hardest thing was getting the microphone and the pie to get along.

Did you visit the website lately? Doesn't seem to be an option anymore :-/

That sucks.

Like Pebble.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I hadn't. This was why I asked: I know there's alternatives out there but there's so much noise. Thanks.

Almond has been posted on HN previously[1]. User voltagex_ commented[2] that self-hosting, while possible is not recommended in the official installation instructions[3] as it is considered significantly more challenging to manage. This may or may not effect your decision to go forward with Almond. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532003 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534793 [3] https://github.c…

Is there any product where self-hosting _isn't_ more difficult? That seems like a generic warning that could apply to pretty much any product in this space. It seems more like a warning to non-technical users who might not have the experience or know-how to successfully set up a server.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#17
Don't bother.

The cloud based solutions are so vastly superior to the current non-cloud solutions that unless you're something of an expert in ASR you're just going to get frustrated. If you're worried about privacy, Google lets you pay a little extra to immediately delete the audio after you send it to their servers.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#18
post #7

Google has papers on device speech recognition, these are used in the keyboard & for live caption on Pixel devices.

This article from the Google AI blog about the Gboard speech recognition is really interesting: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-sp...

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#19

Are you searching for a complete solution including NLP and an engine to perform actions? Some of these are already posted, like Home Assistant, and Mycroft. Sphinx is just for the automatic speech recognition (ASR) part. But there are better solutions for that: Kaldi ( https://kaldi-asr.org/ ) is probably the most comprehensive ASR solution, which yields very competitive state-of-the-art results. RASR ( https://www-…

Already got the action engine: all the lights, hvac, tv, calculator, computers, etc are all controllable. None require internet now. Or any kind of location services for that matter.

I really just want the speech-to-text. Ideally I'd also like it to recognise who's talking. But that's a bonus.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almond has been posted on HN previously[1]. User voltagex_ commented[2] that self-hosting, while possible is not recommended in the official installation instructions[3] as it is considered significantly more challenging to manage. This may or may not effect your decision to go forward with Almond. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532003 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534793 [3] https://github.c…

Is there any product where self-hosting _isn't_ more difficult? That seems like a generic warning that could apply to pretty much any product in this space. It seems more like a warning to non-technical users who might not have the experience or know-how to successfully set up a server.

If it was simply an issue of just "more difficult", then it wouldn't be worth pointing out.

However, the words "significantly more challenging to manage" are straight from their documentation that I linked which I think makes it worth pointing out.

Whether or not it is too challenging is for each individual to decide for themselves.

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