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Mycroft – open source voice assistant

mycroft.ai

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Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#91

Post by Brendinooo »

ghaff wrote: post #83
Brendinooo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "voice assistant space" also includes Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, so it's not going anywhere. I'd contend that it's absolutely not a solution in search of a problem; it's much more of an unsolved problem, and a big part of the "why" is - voice recognition/assistance tech still maturing - major players are insisting that the tech supports their walled gardens - price points are still a problem The last tw…

>- price points are still a problem Really? An Echo Dot is $25 on Amazon right now. Which, if you use it at all, is pretty reasonable. (To be sure, if I were using it for music to any degree, I'd probably get a model with better speakers.) For music, I have an old phone connected to a stereo receiver. So it has voice control although I mostly pick a playlist or album manually.

>An Echo Dot is $25

Yup, price point is solved for the "just timers and some music" people, but now you're stuck in Amazon's orbit.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#92

Post by ghaff »

Brendinooo wrote: post #91
ghaff wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- price points are still a problem Really? An Echo Dot is $25 on Amazon right now. Which, if you use it at all, is pretty reasonable. (To be sure, if I were using it for music to any degree, I'd probably get a model with better speakers.) For music, I have an old phone connected to a stereo receiver. So it has voice control although I mostly pick a playlist or album manually.

>An Echo Dot is $25 Yup, price point is solved for the "just timers and some music" people, but now you're stuck in Amazon's orbit.

That's a pretty weak orbit though if that's all I'm using it for. (I do use mine for music sometimes but it's actually connected to Apple Music.) I could switch to a different assistant tomorrow if I wanted to. I've literally never ordered anything by voice--and can't really see doing so.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#93

Post by shagie »

arbol wrote: post #42
wolczek wrote: post #34

They use Google cloud speech-to-text API, one of the key technology. https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/over... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The pi isn't really fast enough to process the speech in real time. deepspeech by mozilla was cited as an offline alternative to the Google speech API but it's difficult to set up with Mycroft and doesn't work very well (lack of data and lag - https://mycroft.ai/voice-mycroft-ai/ ). Because of this, Mozilla set up Common Voice ( https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en ) to help build open datasets of voice recordings.

> The pi isn't really fast enough to process the speech in real time.

If you've got an iPhone... put it in to airplane mode so that it is local only. You'll note that Siri no longer works when you do this. However... open up the notes app and tap the microphone. Do some interesting text...

> Mister Smith said that he wanted a two by four and half of a pie.

(if you don't have an iDevice, it transcribes this as:

> Mr. Smith said he wanted a 2 x 4 and 1/2 of a pie

That is without a network and done in real time. We can compare the relative processing capabilities of an iPhone and the RPi, but offline speech to text is feasible on a device of limited capabilities.

Additionally, you can do a limited vocabulary speech to text on chip ( https://www.imagesco.com/articles/hm2007/SpeechRecognitionTu... - https://www.amazon.com/HM2007-Speech-Recognition-Integrated-... ). This can handle the specific incantation common tasks (think closer to how a car voice control works - say exactly these words in this order), but that can help with performance for things that are often done.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#94

Post by Brendinooo »

ghaff wrote: post #92
Brendinooo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An Echo Dot is $25 Yup, price point is solved for the "just timers and some music" people, but now you're stuck in Amazon's orbit.

That's a pretty weak orbit though if that's all I'm using it for. (I do use mine for music sometimes but it's actually connected to Apple Music.) I could switch to a different assistant tomorrow if I wanted to. I've literally never ordered anything by voice--and can't really see doing so.

I mean, these things are credibly accused of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, it's not just about the walled garden:

https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/internet/ftc/EPI...

EDIT: other point I forgot - original article says they're bleeding money, so clearly $25 isn't sustainable right now anyways.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#95

Post by GekkePrutser »

shagie wrote: post #86
smoldesu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense to me. Apple's plan works because... their lock-in is better? I can "control most of the lights in my house, stream Apple music and set kitchen timers" with Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and even Bixby. What is Apple's actual advantage here? How is Apple making money from this when Amazon does not?

Apples devices are smarter. This makes them cost more for the "same" hardware, but costs less for the computation. Apple isn't trying to make money with Siri. It's using Siri to make its ecosystem of Apple Music and similar more valuable to its customers. The limits that Apple puts on what it can do makes that cloud side computation less expensive. --- Consider that bit - less expensive. Apple doesn't run its own clo…

I don't think Apple is smarter. Siri is really basic.

I can't even say "Turn on the lights and the fan". I have to present it all in bite-sized chunks. Come on how hard is that.

I have a feeling there is no AI in these supposedly intelligent assistants. Only scripted stuff.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#96

Post by theptip »

jm4 wrote: post #89
theptip wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems odd right? Just charge more than break-even for Alexa and you have a business?

Not necessarily because the cost increases through increased use by the customer. The idea was to sell hardware at close to cost and then monetize the customer. The likely assumption was that Alexa users would buy more similar to how Prime customers buy more. Ideally, Alexa customers were supposed to use services like "subscribe and save" and then randomly tell Alexa to order more toilet paper or laundry detergent. A…

Right, I read the Ars Technica article, I get the original idea. It turns out that monetization strategy doesn't work and the Alexa business unit is losing billions of dollars.

I'm saying, new business idea: give up on the old strategy of Alexa driving induced profit in other business units, instead charge more than the breakeven cost of building devices and running the service. This will likely be substantially more, and fewer Alexas will be sold. But the users that do actually get a lot of value from the device and service they are using will pay more for it.

The product/market fit to test is: How many customers would pay more for a device that's not trying to sell you things? Can you get a solid (but smaller) business just by charging more for the device? What features would you add to persuade the marginal user to pay more? Offline mode for privacy-conscious users? Lean in to home automation features? What about a true AI-powered personal assistant? What about per-user language training with a local model that gets refined by your voice samples, with that data not shared back to the cloud? Etc.

Simple startup-style product iteration stuff here. You had a customer hypothesis and a growth model, and it was proven unviable. So can you pivot to find a viable business?

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#97

Post by ncallaway »

theptip wrote: post #78
jm4 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the entire space is dying. Amazon is having problems because Alexa has little benefit to them outside of direct monetization. They wanted people to use Alexa to buy things and no one wants to shop like that. So they have these devices and all this infrastructure to run people's kitchen timers, lights and play music. People will buy Alexa devices on Prime Day, use them dozens of times a day for years, an…

Seems odd right? Just charge more than break-even for Alexa and you have a business?

Charge more than break even for Alexa and they won’t sell enough.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#98

Post by GekkePrutser »

Brendinooo wrote: post #13

I backed on IndieGoGo (in late 2018 I think), then helped crowdfund on StartEngine. I want so badly to speak well of these guys, and since I invested I want them to succeed, but it's been getting harder to do so. They deserve credit for being reasonably transparent about their processes though. Their blog has been very interesting to follow. They had a ton of issues trying to work out their original design, then the…

Those prices are really insane tbh. No way it will take off like that, it's just a non-starter. 200 was already the upper limit of what's doable.

I think they're stretching too much to satisfy the original backers and it's commendable not giving up on them but if it's going to be similar to Alexa, Siri or Google it's just not good enough.

If it were an actual assistant I could talk to, then yes. It would be worth it.

Imagine this.. I'm doing my laundry and mycroft pipes up.

"hey Alice is looking for you on telegram"

"Tell her I'll get back to her after I finish the laundry"

"Ok!" ... "She says it's urgent, are you sure"?

"Ok call her please on speaker"

Or another scenario.

"hey mycroft I'm going out to the zoo"

"Ok make sure you bring an umbrella because it's going to rain in 2 hours "

Stuff like this. Right now assistants have zero short term memory, don't remember any of my preferences and can only understand one thing at a time. They're also not proactive at all. They don't know my life and habits and don't warn me when things are happening that I should know about. Yet most of those things are easily identified from notifications on my phone! It's not a stretch to expect this IMO. It's all thing I'd expect from a real assistant. All this low-hanging fruit turn on the bedroom light stuff is not worth money.

It's just that there's not much sales to link to it other than the service price (which I'd definitely pay for!!).

I don't think these scenarios are too far-fetched with the current state of AI tbh.

Ps blaming the pandemic is a bit rich. Their project was already down the drain for years before that. First they canned the original plan and then they had this DIY raspberry addon board and that was in huge trouble well before the pandemic. I'm sure it made matters worse but if they'd managed it properly it would all have been fulfilled years before corona meant anything other than beer.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#99

Post by shagie »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #95
shagie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples devices are smarter. This makes them cost more for the "same" hardware, but costs less for the computation. Apple isn't trying to make money with Siri. It's using Siri to make its ecosystem of Apple Music and similar more valuable to its customers. The limits that Apple puts on what it can do makes that cloud side computation less expensive. --- Consider that bit - less expensive. Apple doesn't run its own clo…

I don't think Apple is smarter. Siri is really basic. I can't even say "Turn on the lights and the fan". I have to present it all in bite-sized chunks. Come on how hard is that. I have a feeling there is no AI in these supposedly intelligent assistants. Only scripted stuff.

There is more processing done in the Siri local device than there is in the Alexa local device.

It's not "Siri is smarter" but rather "Apple is working on minimizing cloud costs because it is entirely a cost for them."

Siri is scripted and limited to make it locally "smarter".

With Amazon and Alexa, everything goes to AWS because that's where the entirety of Alexa's processing happens. The hardware devices in the homes are "dumb" terminals for AWS with a voice interface. This allows Amazon to make use of AWS as much as it can and do something with "surplus" computing power that it has available on AWS.

Re: Mycroft – open source voice assistant

#100

Post by zamadatix »

smoldesu wrote: post #74
rolenthedeep wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice assistants which are trying to force engagement to squeeze money out of you are dying. Most people only use the voice assistants for a few simple tasks, which is perfect for an open source project like mycroft. It is, however, very, very bad for Amazon and Google, because those tasks don't make them money. That's why they're all going so aggressive on "you asked for the time, but by the way here's a 5 minute sp…

> That's why they're all going so aggressive on "you asked for the time, but by the way here's a 5 minute speech on all the easily monetizable tasks I can do instead" This is a word-for-word description of how Siri originally functioned. "You asked for the top 5 romantic resturaunts nearby; here are the top results from Google Search:"

GP isn't talking about bad fallback answers where it punts you to a search page more like when you ask "Hey Alexa, what is the time" and it says "The time is 5:45 PM. By the way did you know you can buy ribbons for the holidays on Amazon by saying..." i.e. things that are blatantly unrelated to answering your question and often trying to sell you something.
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