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Firefox Voice

voice.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Voice

#131

Post by dividedbyzero »

eganist wrote: post #130
dreamcompiler wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. We absolutely will not. The only reason people believe this is that they've forgotten how to do speaker-dependent recognition (SDR), which is more accurate and more secure anyway. We were doing SDR in the 80s with 1/1000 the CPU power and 1/1000 the memory. SDR does require an initial training session, but once that's do…

Who's "we" in this context? Because just below you, HN has comments from willing donors. My point being that while there may still be a market for SDR, there's a broader market for speaker-independent recognition (SIR) simply because people want the tech to just work rather than feel like they messed up training the device when the device can't recognize them.

Using someone else's voice assistant is also a legitimate use case, especially if it's used to control music, lights, blinds, AC, car functionality ... that absolutely requires solid SIR.

Re: Firefox Voice

#132

Post by specialist »

bartvk wrote: post #84
djsumdog wrote: post #60

I've looked into open source voice assistants before. I found mycroft, Jarvis and a few others, but either got bogged down in dependencies or configuration. Many supported shipping your data to Google or Amazon if you configured it, or an open source voice recognition tool. I hate this idea that our voice has to be shipped somewhere to be processed. I remember a lot of the speech-to-text tools in the early 2000s were…

Even Apple, with its focus on privacy and local AI, needs an internet connection for most Siri queries.

Drives me nuts. "Hey Siri, Pause" shouldn't require an internet connection. I often have bad or no connection (eg podcasts while hiking). Voice commands must be ubiquitous. If I have to fail-revert back to touch, what's the point?

Re: Firefox Voice

#133

Post by oergiR »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #129
AsyncAwait wrote: post #107

I see a lot of skeptical voices here, (somewhat warranted, given it's a voice assistant technology), but the fact remains that if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. This extension is trying to provide some useful functionality in the hopes that Mozilla gets more data for https://commonvoice.mozilla.org I'd at least consider recording your voice, especially if…

> if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. We absolutely will not. The only reason people believe this is that they've forgotten how to do speaker-dependent recognition (SDR), which is more accurate and more secure anyway. We were doing SDR in the 80s with 1/1000 the CPU power and 1/1000 the memory. SDR does require an initial training session, but once that's do…

Training a speaker-specific recogniser that improves over a generic recogniser requires a lot more data nowadays. First, generic systems are a lot better and trained on a lot more data nowadays. Second, speaker adaptation worked better for the Gaussian mixture models from the late nineties (don’t know about the eighties) than for neural networks.

Re: Firefox Voice

#134

Post by jasonlotito »

joecool1029 wrote: post #104
adito wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's first time I heard that, not to mean that I didn't believe you, but what's the exact text you sent that is made them censor and banned you?

Screenshot of the text I sent: https://ibb.co/X5LB4qp

I mean, that’s the last text you sent. There was clearly other text you sent that was baseless speculation. There was history there you’ve not shown. Pretending as if this is the only text that mattered is dishonest.

I can see why they “banned” if you can’t even be honest to third parties.

Re: Firefox Voice

#135

Post by input_sh »

Alright, gave it a shot. First impressions:

* "Make me laugh" always brings me to the same YouTube video.

* Had pretty much no issues with the default prompts. It was able to find some challenging Spotify playlists, open random websites (including non-standard English domains ones when I spelled them out).

* "Read this page" uses an awful TTS engine, which is a shame considering that I might actually use this feature on a somewhat regular basis. I'm assuming it uses whatever it detects on the OS level, and so far I haven't bothered with finding a better one (on Ubuntu, if you know of one, please suggest).

* "Set a timer for X min" works just fine, which is probably the only thing I use Google's assistant on my phone (or whatever it's name might be now).

* I like the idea of routines in the app settings, which is supposed to tie multiple queries together. I could see myself using it for something like a morning routine (tell me what time it is, give me weather info, read me news, etc.)

Re: Firefox Voice

#136

Post by IgorPartola »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #107

I see a lot of skeptical voices here, (somewhat warranted, given it's a voice assistant technology), but the fact remains that if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. This extension is trying to provide some useful functionality in the hopes that Mozilla gets more data for https://commonvoice.mozilla.org I'd at least consider recording your voice, especially if…

Very good point. Honestly I use my Echos for exactly two things: turning smart lights on and off and setting timers. I occasionally will ask it the weather or to play a song or a podcast. That’s about it. It seems like for my use cases it doesn’t need full on speech recognition and the million Alexa skills out there. Just a few simple phrases would suffice.

Re: Firefox Voice

#137

Post by acdha »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #129
AsyncAwait wrote: post #107

I see a lot of skeptical voices here, (somewhat warranted, given it's a voice assistant technology), but the fact remains that if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. This extension is trying to provide some useful functionality in the hopes that Mozilla gets more data for https://commonvoice.mozilla.org I'd at least consider recording your voice, especially if…

> if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. We absolutely will not. The only reason people believe this is that they've forgotten how to do speaker-dependent recognition (SDR), which is more accurate and more secure anyway. We were doing SDR in the 80s with 1/1000 the CPU power and 1/1000 the memory. SDR does require an initial training session, but once that's do…

You say “forgotten” as if we had great tools everyone just forgot about. Having actually used those systems I am rather skeptical of that claim - they really seemed to have hit a certain functional plateau below the level of modern systems.

Put another way, if this was off the shelf, why isn’t anyone marketing it?

Re: Firefox Voice

#138

Post by binwiederhier »

synesthesiam wrote: post #118
djsumdog wrote: post #60

I've looked into open source voice assistants before. I found mycroft, Jarvis and a few others, but either got bogged down in dependencies or configuration. Many supported shipping your data to Google or Amazon if you configured it, or an open source voice recognition tool. I hate this idea that our voice has to be shipped somewhere to be processed. I remember a lot of the speech-to-text tools in the early 2000s were…

> I found mycroft, Jarvis and a few others, but either got bogged down in dependencies or configuration. More recently, there is also Rhasspy ( https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io ) and voice2json ( https://voice2json.org ). I'm the author of both, if you have questions. > Why is everything done in "the cloud." Besides being a way of collecting data and ultimately making money, it avoids some of the "bogged down in depend…

Very cool projects. Thanks for sharing (and creating them!).

Re: Firefox Voice

#139

Post by Terretta »

input_sh wrote: post #127
dhaavi wrote: post #80

"We’ve instructed the Google Speech-to-Text engine to NOT save any recordings." Hahaha! :D Thanks for the good laugh.

Bigger players have the leverage to get companies to do something they don't do out-of-the-box. They can contractually oblige them to do that, as well as sue each other if one side breaks its part of the deal.

If they could guarantee Google doesn’t, they’d say that. Thus the much lesser claim “instructed” which carries no such assurance.

I agree with and applaud their truthful choice of words. There’s no such thing as “contractually oblige”.

// To keep yourself cognitive, consider one party receiving a National Security Letter (“NSL”) with gag order.

Re: Firefox Voice

#140

Post by marcinzm »

Cybiote wrote: post #122
panpanna wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we want open, on-device voice recognition, we'll have to do the work and donate sample data. Fair enough, but is any stopping Mozilla from _also_ selling your voice data to third parties including advertisers and commercial ML interests? (Asking this because Firefox has started sharing our data with leanplum)

It still remains a risk well worth taking. With Mozilla, it is merely uncertain but for just about every other company, it is all but guaranteed. You can plainly see this philosophy in the industry's naming sense, where super-computers of yester-year are relegated to "edge" roles. As of today, the open source and free software equivalents to machine learning and AI products are sorely lacking when compared to commerc…

>With Mozilla, it is merely uncertain but for just about every other company, it is all but guaranteed

I disagree, most large companies view this data as a competitive advantage and won't sell it directly. They may sell the results but the data itself is their moat. Smaller companies on the other hand are more willing to sacrifice future profits for current money.

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