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Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

discourse.mozilla.org

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Re: Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

#61

Post by qchris »

floatingatoll wrote: post #35
no_wizard wrote: post #8

I don’t know what is going to save Mozilla, really I don’t. I just wish there was a way to “reach” them and discuss how we the internet community could come to an agreement about what they could do to derive value we would pay for. It’s not for a lack of trying on their part for sure, but it feels like just using their browser isn’t all there is to it any more

What would you personally pay Mozilla for?

I'm already personally paying Mozilla $8/mo for their VPN and private browser extension.

If they offered something like the services offered by mailbox.org, or Librem One? I'd switch my GMail account tomorrow, including the storage fees I'm paying on it, and would do it at triple the cost for not abusing my data. Hell, they already have the domain experience with their proximity to Thunderbird devs.

Re: Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

#62

Post by qchris »

no_wizard wrote: post #43
echelon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla can model itself after Microsoft somewhat. Provide a development stack (they're experts at Web and Rust). Make themselves the go-to shop for developers in that realm. Sell them on an OS and editor with support. Partner with Ubuntu. Hell, I would even reach out to Nadella and see if they'd be willing to work with Mozilla on hedging against Google. Mac is becoming locked down and kind of unpleasant to develop o…

This all sounds to me like capital intensive businesses against entrenched players where even the not so average consumer would likely not do more than pay lip service to it unless there was some secret sauce to this that was more compelling to the options They neeed a good out of the park product in those markets to make any real headway. Too idealistic. My only thought on this is that they should pivot to be like a…

Do they? I mean, most of these vendors are already competing, and unlike Firefox, they're not necessarily competing for the average Joe, but technical users who often have different priorities.

Those are also services that groups are used to paying for already, which means if they could eat the start-up costs, even at a reduced scale, they could make a profit at even a slight premium for things that they already do very well, and go from there.

Re: Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

#64

Post by strictnein »

narag wrote: post #52
no_wizard wrote: post #8

I don’t know what is going to save Mozilla, really I don’t. I just wish there was a way to “reach” them and discuss how we the internet community could come to an agreement about what they could do to derive value we would pay for. It’s not for a lack of trying on their part for sure, but it feels like just using their browser isn’t all there is to it any more

what they could do to derive value we would pay for For someone that found Linux in the 90's and watched the birth of Mozilla from the ashes of Netscape, that's a very strange thing to read. This site is not Slashdot, I know. It always had another kind of relation to business and money. But still... I have no idea why Mozilla should need a business model. Much less I understand why should we think of one and agree on…

> I have no idea why Mozilla should need a business model.

Because developers aren't free and "let's get money from Google searches" is great until Google decides not to fund a competitor any more.

Re: Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

#65

Post by utunga »

I work with Mozilla's DeepSpeech every day. Mozilla's STT is critical to the survival of important indigenous languages throughout the world.

I sincerely hope we can help make this project continue and that Mozilla can help us do that.

Ensuring indigenous languages have digital representation is essential to their survival. Speech recognition and synthesis are a vital part of that. Indigenous communities are often ignored by Big Tech because they bring little financial value to their bottom lines, but financial bottom lines are not everything. Culture is more important. Open source tools like DeepSpeech allow communities to build the tools they need for themselves.

Māori have been working to help build tools for te reo Māori, and our project is at the forefront of using open source tools like DeepSpeech to revitalize the Māori language. The core of a good speech recognition system helps us in many practical ways, such as improved transcription, support for pronunciation, correct announcements in public transport, correct information on maps and in many other ways. We may well continue to support and use DeepSpeech if the project can continue.

But there are also many other projects in other countries in the world who may follow on - such as the Kabyle people of Algeria who are using DeepSpeech, or the Mohawk nation in North America who have been looking into it.

By the way we are working on our web presence but for now this quick one pager gives some idea of the work we are doing - https://papareo.nz.

Re: Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

#66

Post by panpanna »

qchris wrote: post #59
nshm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is explainable given that there was a single developer working on TTS. It is hard to compete with big academic teams/industry players this way. I also believe Mozilla team was restricted by a lack of computing resources. They had just a single 8GPU server or so.

This is an area that I find unbelievably frustrating. A lack of computing resources in the current day is kind of insane. You can buy an 8GB GPU for <$1000. Even with the rest of the costs, the cost of hardware like this is a drop in the bucket when your main office is housed in Mountain View! Especially on a project that ends up being public-facing, these are missed opportunities where a little can go a long way.

We need a SETI@home approach to open source AI models.

Only then we can break our dependency on Google and Facebook - and Mozilla for that matter.

Re: Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

#67

Post by nshm »

utunga wrote: post #65

I work with Mozilla's DeepSpeech every day. Mozilla's STT is critical to the survival of important indigenous languages throughout the world. I sincerely hope we can help make this project continue and that Mozilla can help us do that. Ensuring indigenous languages have digital representation is essential to their survival. Speech recognition and synthesis are a vital part of that. Indigenous communities are often ig…

Is your current data public? Do you have sufficient amount of untranscribed data (1000+ hours)? We could help you.

Re: Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

#68

Post by nshm »

panpanna wrote: post #66
qchris wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an area that I find unbelievably frustrating. A lack of computing resources in the current day is kind of insane. You can buy an 8GB GPU for <$1000. Even with the rest of the costs, the cost of hardware like this is a drop in the bucket when your main office is housed in Mountain View! Especially on a project that ends up being public-facing, these are missed opportunities where a little can go a long way.

We need a SETI@home approach to open source AI models. Only then we can break our dependency on Google and Facebook - and Mozilla for that matter.

It is going on, see https://github.com/learning-at-home/hivemind and https://github.com/bytedance/fedlearner

Re: Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

#69

Post by sjagoe »

chromedev wrote: post #60
echelon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is shoved down grandma's throat. She probably doesn't know much other than it's the "Google Internet thing". It's the default on Android and Google.com nags you to install it. This is worrying given that Google cripples the browser and web standards to favor its own search engine and advertising platform. Killed the semantic web and semantic markup? Check. Disabled APIs for blocking ads? Check. Use Google.com…

> Killed the semantic web and semantic markup? Check. Based on what evidence? > Disabled APIs for blocking ads? Check They didn't. uBlock Origin and adblocker extensions never stopped working. > Use Google.com as the default search? Yep. What do you think Edge does here? Easily changed via policies. > Auto log into your Google session or nag until users permit it? Absolutely Doesn't nag you and easily disabled in set…

> > Disabled APIs for blocking ads? Check

> They didn't. uBlock Origin and adblocker extensions never stopped working.

That was probably this issue in the chromium tracker https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897...

I don't know what happened after that though; the conclusion of that issue (in Jan 2019) was "these changes are draft, and still being discussed".

Re: Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

#70

Post by InfiniteRand »

treis wrote: post #57
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the profitable product that Rust enables? Surely that's Firefox?

Nobody is building anything based on Firefox. It's not like Rails or .NET that gives your application a head start.

People used to build a lot of software around Gecko, there are still some notable users like Komodo IDE, but Firefox is a lot harder to embed than it once was. Servo from the Rust team was supposed to solve this by providing a new embeddable browser core, not sure if that is still the long term plan
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