271–280 of 290 posts
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The developers could do sneaky things with any device that has wifi and a mic.
And yet most people have a phone in their pocket.
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after setting up the system, if I say "turn the ceiling lights to 20%", who else would be changing the lights? But also, post-fix wake word would also be natural if it was recording all the time. "turn on the lights, Google", for instance
Someone in a TV show that you're watching?
I’d love a no-wake-word world where something locally was always chewing on what you said but I’m not sure how well it would work in practice.
I think it would only take 1-2 instances of it hearing “Hey, who turned off the lights?” in a show turning off my lights for real (and scaring the crap out of me). Doctor Who isn’t particularly scary but if I was watching Silence in the Library and that line turned off my lights I’d be spoked and it would take me a hot minute to realize what happened.
You should talk to Sonos about partnering with them. They currently have a very limited Sonos voice assist, plus Google Voice and Alexa, but the latter two are limited pre-LLM assistants. I’m assuming they eventually want to create their own LLM and something privacy focused would be good match for their customers. I don’t know how they feel about open source though
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The developers could do sneaky things with any device that has wifi and a mic.
And yet most people have a phone in their pocket.
An actually good product in this space IMO needs to be able to define specific sets of actions and allow agents to perform only the permitted actions.
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I have four bedrooms, living/family room, study, office, rumpus room, garage, workshop, and trying to build out a basement with three more rooms. Each of these rooms have some form of smart lighting or devices like TVs or thermostats that people have a much easier time controlling with voice than phone apps. Granted this may sound extravagant but I have a large family so all this space is all very well utilized hence…
What's condition 2?
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Kickstarter is often basically a group buy. Project owners make MVPs and market/pitch it, get funding from the public, and then commission a large batch run.
A group buy is when you want to buy a bunch of existing product at wholesaler prices. Kickstarter is about funding new project that don’t exist yet. Like if the wholesaler refuses to sell you 1000 video cards, just give the money back. If you spend the Kickstarter money and can’t land a product there isn’t much you can do for refunds.
What you describe is unquestionably a group buy, but in, for example, the mechanical keyboards community, a "group buy" is paying the designer of a thing (keyboard, keycap set, etc.) for the expense of third-party production up front. It's really more of a preorder that requires a certain volume to proceed. But regardless, they're called group buys in that hobby.
(With expected mixed results, I should add -- plenty of keyboard "group buys" never come to fruition, and since they're not backed by a Kickstarter-like platform, the money is just gone. The /r/mechanicalkeyboards subreddit has many such stories.)
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Open source
Yeah, OP is comparing this to Google/Amazon/Apple/etc devices but this is being developed by the nonprofit that manages development on Home Assistant and in cooperation with their large community of users. It's a very different attitude driving development of voice remotes for Home Assistant vs. large corporations. They've been around for a while now and have a proven track record of being actual, serious advocates f…
Thanks; it seems I actually needed to spell that out in my post.
Here's what I'm looking for in a voice assistant: - Full privacy: nothing goes to the "cloud" - Non-shitty microphones and processing: i want to be able to be heard without having to yell, repeat, or correct - No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it, and understand when it's being addressed. Since everything is private and local, this is now doable - Conversational: it should understand when I finis…
> No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it, and understand when it's being addressed Even humans struggle with this one - that's what names are for!
That's exactly why there's massive latencies between command recognition, processing, and execution.
Imagine if it had sub-ms response to "assistant, add uuh eggs and milk to the shopping list... actually no just eggs sorry"
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I'm also very excited. I've had some ESP32 microphones before, but they were not really able to understand the wake word, sometimes even when it was quiet and you were sitting next to the mic. This one looks like it can recognize your voice very well, even when music is playing. Because... when it works, it's amazing. You get that Star Trek wake word (KHUM-PUTER!), you can connect your favorite LLM to it (ChatGPT, Cl…
As a side note, it always slightly puzzles me when I see "voice interface" and "private" used together. Maybe it takes living alone to issue voice commands and feel some privacy. (Yes, I do understand that "privacy" here is mostly about not sending it for processing to third parties.)
Perhaps your definition of "private" is more stringent than most people's. Collective privacy exists, for example "The family would appreciate some privacy as they grieve". It is correct to term something "private" when it is shared with your entire household, but no one else.