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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it's a clone of the trivial parts of the Echo, but not the difficult parts that are necessary to make it great, specifically:

* Beamforming microphone array (this is a real clone: http://www.xmos.com/products/microphones )

* Wake-word / hot-word detection ("Ok Google", "Alexa", etc.)

* Intent recognition / NLU

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Even if true, not sure why you wrote such a snarky comment. This obviously is a side project of the author and just serves as an inspiration, it's not like he is asking money for it or anything.

I think it's probably because the headline called it a clone, which sort of implies 1:1 feature parity. It's neat, but it's not a clone.

There are plenty of "iPhone clones" that don't come close to feature parity, so it seems a bit picky.

Pedantic stupidity.

No. Wow. Clarification is not Pedantry.

Did not sound snarky at all to me. Very factual, and had a very minimal, neutral tone to it.

Also informative to people who don't know echo at all.

They're not commenting on the quality of Jarvis (an excellent project), but on the headline. One of the key features of Echo, and one which is essential for something like this, is a good microphone. Most off the shelf ones are useless for this, and so the Echo provides fantastic value by delivering not only the voice recognition/action platform, but the hardware to make it work well.

I'd challenge someone to make a practical device that leverages Jarvis. Most microphones just aren't up to it.

I will say, I find the trend of HN posts that say "clone" of some commercial product but are missing significant features to be kind of frustrating. It tends to devalue the work that's actually involved in creating successful projects - and thus the work of software engineering.

Reminds me of the coding horror post, "Code: It's trivial" http://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/

It is PR to sell one of their products

It's open source :) https://github.com/monteslu/pagenodes

It does have wake word detection, and even has that code right there in the article. It matches on jarvis/nervous/service/travis as the first word in the phrase, because those are the words that get returned by the speech recognition when he says 'jarvis'.

That ambiguity in hotword detection makes me nervous.

Some of that stuff isn't too hard, if you can narrow down the domain of words you need to recognize. For example, let's say you wanted to have a hot word of "computer", like in star trek, you can literally filter the output of the recognizer (e.g. pocketsphinx) with grep and sed and it works not too badly. For the natural language part, you can get pretty far with a simple parser like the old infocom games used, esp. if your domain is limited. I'm making an open source multiplayer networked starship bridge simulator, kind of like star trek, using pocketsphinx for speech recognition, and it's working ok (not perfect, but ok.) Here is a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfcme7maygw

actually somebody even cross-compiled pocketsphinx to javascript with emscripten for this purpose:

https://syl22-00.github.io/pocketsphinx.js/live-demo.html

this works pretty well - all in the browser, especially if you drop in some better acoustic models.

Yeah I wouldn't call that "pretty well" - I said "not a number" and it outputted "one two one" on the digits example.

Maybe it just wasn't trained well enough to reject non-number inputs, but.. yeah doesn't exactly change my experience that Sphinx is awful.

You have to use a decent acoustic model - not the one in the demo. If you do I think it works 'pretty well' as a proof of concept. That said I'm not recommending Sphinx as a recognition framework, it is way behind the times in 2016, but this is the only 'in the wild' demo of this I've seen on the web, so I felt it was worth mentioning.

I thought that "beamforming" only applied to actively emitting signals, so that the waveforms would cancel/reinforce each other, to get the desired "direction". I have no idea how that works for microphones. Google is not very helpful, I get lots of hits for products.

A much more intuitive name for beamforming is spatial filtering [1]. It just means using mutiple receivers along with knowledge about their location to filter out noise and other signals you don't want. The term also applies to emitters like phased radar arrays or MIMO cell towers which can use spatial filtering for beamforming but it's a general technique.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming

Thanks, I've always seen a Beamforming option in my DD-WRT Router but didn't know the exactly technical implementation.

Thank you!

It's a reciprocal process, meaning that it works for transmit as well as receive. In the receive direction, the antennas/microphones sample the incoming waves at various spatial points, and then the cancelling/reinforcing occurs when the received signals are phase shifted or delayed and summed.

Of course this was more of a fun example of something you can do with the Page Nodes platform than an actual echo replacement. And a way of getting started connecting services.

Definitely move on to some dedicated hardware if you're serious about this sort of thing.

$750 for the mic?!? (http://www.xmos.com/buy?product=20258)

Development kits are expensive due to low sales volume, no cost optimization, and buyers' price insensitivity. There is a huge amount of value in having a known good implementation on hand when designing hardware or firmware. Additionally, having the development kit means your firmware team can start developing before your hardware arrives.

If you have a good relationship with them, sales reps will often give or lend development kits.

Thx :)

My comment was more about the parent's comment of it being "a real clone" when a Dot is 1/8th the price of this.

Even that XMos dev kit won't give you all you need for the beam-forming part of the microphone array: "Customer adds own DSP to create differentiated product" The DSP is where you'd implement the beam-forming algorithm to get one clear audio stream rather than 8...

wow, that microphone array you linked costs USD$750! Are there any cheaper alternatives?

Not that I've found yet, but the actual hardware on that board costs something like $10-15, so someone could easily make one.

The high price is because it's a development board. (I think it's a silly to price development boards highly, but it is very common.)

I hope a chinese manufacturer makes one soon. The teardown for Echo had the parts for a bit more than that, but you could do it cheaper, multichannel ADC and half a dozen MEMS mics. I guess drivers would be the time consuming bit

The board actually doesn't appear to have an ADC, the microphones output pulse density encoded digital data wich can be directly received and interpreted by the processor.

I'm curious, how would you recommend they be priced?

Every comment that starts with "curious" seem to be spam on HN. Is this always the same guy or a bot? Almost every HN topic contains one of these "curious" comments...

It's a common English idiom, but even though I've been here over twice as long as your account date I can't say I've noticed an infestation of "curious" comments... though given curiosity is a hacker virtue, perhaps it's not surprising there may be more of it here? I still am genuinely curious how GGP would have dev boards priced instead -- the market is pretty much limited to students (the ones at good schools have the schools pay for the boards, or the schools get discounts) or professionals (who again expense through their company), what's the incentive to lower prices?

Xmos mainly sells development kits to showcase their chips - that's why they're that expensive.

I think the Microsoft Kinect comes with a Microphone Array.

PS3 Eye too, 4 microphones AFAIK. Those had a big discount on Amazon recently.

EDIT: Still are, 5 bucks.

http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-Eye-3/dp/B000VTQ3LU

I've got one knocking about in the drawer. Let me know if you get beamforming working on it. I think there are multi channel audio drivers for Linux/RPi for PS3 Eye

Welp, looks like I just bought 3, haha! Thanks!

Yes Kinect has an array of 4 mics and can do audio beam forming. Plus there's a terrific SDK for Windows.

I said it in a thread about the Kinect - I think it's only 135 (ish) degrees of reception, and sometimes it can be more finicky than that.

I'd love to get my hands on an open source array.

I'm guessing that XCore product is well out of the price range of hobbyists, which is unfortunate.

I'm not sure why posters on HN are so eager to shit on other people's work. Maybe something to do with arrogance or insecurity (leading to a need to bash on others)?

Or maybe calling it an "Amazon Echo clone," which insinuates it covers almost all the bases Echo does, was a bit premature? It could have just been called "voice controlled PDA"

I don't think it's "shitting on" it (although text is notorious for making things seem far more serious or critical than they actually are), just clarifying the remaining differences.

I didn't mean to shit on it, only the disingenuous title.

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