Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

discourse.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–75 of 75 posts

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

#71

Post by nmstoker »

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.

I take your point but according to the release details on the repo it was not 8Gb on one card but a server with 8 cards, each a Quadro RTX 6000 with 24Gb, and they're around £4k each currently, so the cost of the GPUs alone is £32k

https://github.com/mozilla/STT/releases/tag/v0.8.2

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

#72

Post by NegatioN »

Cybiote wrote: post #41
mrweasel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cutting out DeepSpeech seems sensible to me, it’s out of place in the general portfolio of products. It would be nice if Mozilla could tell us what their focus is going to be, but I doubt that Mozilla management know at this point. At this point I’m somewhat concerned that Firefox will be irrelevant in fives years, and I don’t currently feel that Mozilla is communicating clearly that they still care about Firefox. I…

> Cutting out DeepSpeech seems sensible to me, it’s out of place in the general portfolio of products. I disagree precisely because of the point you make later: "I’m somewhat concerned that Firefox will be irrelevant in fives years" . Functionality provided by deep learning is going to be an important component of many types of software interactions going forward. The logistics of this will be quite different from wh…

Even Google is trying to offload as much of these computations to on-device chips as possible nowadays though.

Their new Pixel has voice control entirely backed by on-device models for example.

I think SaaS is a stopgap for good ML, and that eventually enough of this will be open source, that basic tasks such as vision and speech will be cheap to solve for any company with high tech competency.

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

#73

Post by kouohhashi »

eruleman wrote: post #9

Does anyone know of other open-source projects in the speech-to-text space? DeepSpeech was one of the most promising projects, especially the latest versions...

deepspeech.pytorch is a good one. Since Mozilla's DeepSpeech project is still using tensorflow 1.x, I think pytorch implementation is actually better. https://github.com/SeanNaren/deepspeech.pytorch

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

#74

Post by qchris »

nmstoker wrote: post #71
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.

I take your point but according to the release details on the repo it was not 8Gb on one card but a server with 8 cards, each a Quadro RTX 6000 with 24Gb, and they're around £4k each currently, so the cost of the GPUs alone is £32k https://github.com/mozilla/STT/releases/tag/v0.8.2

Ah, I see-- not an 8GB, 1-GPU server, but an 8-GPU server. That does make a bit of a difference, changing the cost from a new workstation to functionally a piece of capital equipment. Still, I'm not sure that my point about equipment costs falls short--even at (call it) $40K, you're probably talking less than 3 months of the company's all-in cost for the developer themself, amortized over multiple years.

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

#75

Post by juststeve »

ralph84 wrote: post #16
juststeve wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building B2B services around rust ie. onsite training, consulting, development to me seems better than firing people - what am I missing here?

Almost all company-sponsored programming languages are run as loss leaders to enable selling some other profitable product of the company. What is the profitable product that Rust enables?

Well an IDE would’ve been one option, as well as backend services for enterprise who are migrating to Rust. Otherwise as I mentioned the product is services like outsourced development, consultancy and training resources?
Post reply on HN