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Firefox Voice

voice.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Voice

#141

Post by Eyght »

input_sh wrote: post #135

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…

I tested the phrase "go to kyle's channel on twitch" and it actually went to twitch.tv/kyle - which I found impressive.

Re: Firefox Voice

#142

Post by marcinzm »

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…

Let's say you have two companies A and B. A does on-device only and B does in the cloud. Even if their systems begin being just as accurate, B has an ever growing stream of new training data with which to improve their system. A does not. Over time B will become better and better while A does not. Worse, by downloading the model onto devices the model can be easily copied, cloned, reverse engineered, interrogated and otherwise used by competitors.

Re: Firefox Voice

#143

Post by AsyncAwait »

marcinzm wrote: post #140
Cybiote wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is an open dataset. There's no point selling a dataset that's already free.

As far as recording things I didn't consent to, the likes of Google way more likely to do that[1].

1 - https://mashable.com/article/google-assistant-microphone-smo...

Re: Firefox Voice

#144

Post by StavrosK »

IgorPartola wrote: post #136
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.

I'd go farther and say that I specifically don't want the million Alexa skills out there. A system that let me write my own intents with access to the top-level namespace would be ideal, but it would absolutely need to come with good hardware. That's where Alexa/Google have the upper hand currently, I think.

Re: Firefox Voice

#145

Post by remexre »

person_of_color wrote: post #34
dsteinman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepSpeech is too large to run as a browser extension.

Have they tried nanonets?

Googled those, and it looks like some company selling remotely-running models, which I think is what GP was referring to. Is there another technique that's been SEOd out by this company?

Re: Firefox Voice

#146

Post by dreamcompiler »

acdha wrote: post #137
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…

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?

One reason may be that since it doesn't require a cloud, there's no personal data to mine. Try getting VC without a recurring revenue stream. It's probably possible but it's more difficult. Same story for IoT: Cloudless home automation is trivial from a technical point of view, but cloudless home automation is a non-starter VC-wise.

Re: Firefox Voice

#147

Post by lights0123 »

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.

That's not anything special—in fact, it's the default. You may optionally enable it and get discounted pricing: https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/data-logging

Re: Firefox Voice

#148

Post by codekansas »

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.

I think this can be viewed as a marketing and UX problem, sort of. It reminds me of the Wii Amiibo - people actually paid money to train their AI bots because of how Nintendo designed them. Not sure how many people, but a reasonable enough segment of the market that Nintendo thought it a worthwhile investment anyway

Re: Firefox Voice

#149

Post by acdha »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #146
acdha wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One reason may be that since it doesn't require a cloud, there's no personal data to mine. Try getting VC without a recurring revenue stream. It's probably possible but it's more difficult. Same story for IoT: Cloudless home automation is trivial from a technical point of view, but cloudless home automation is a non-starter VC-wise.

This was a field with multiple products on the market. How much VC do you need to deliver benchmarks of shipping software?

Similarly, saying cloudless home automation is easy sounds like you’re leaving out a lot of experience other people gained about the challenges of getting consumer adoption with the need to take on 24x7 server maintenance, connectivity challenges blocking popular features, etc. which made that class of products less appealing to most customers.

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