Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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Ten years ago I played with Microsoft Speech API - which was completely off-line and trained off your voice. In restricted grammar mode, it worked flawlessly - I built a music control application on it, and utilized it like you would use Amazon Echo - I just said "computer, volume, three quarters" from any place in the room, and the loud music turned down a notch. Etc. That was ten years ago, with a crappy electret microphone I soldered to a cable myself and sticked to my wardrobe with a bit of insulating tape.

I'm not buying you couldn't make a decent, self-contained, off-line speech recognition system. Sure, it may not be as good as Echo or Google Now (though the latter does suck hardly at times, it's nowhere near reliable to use, and it doesn't understand shit over a quite good and expensive Bluetooth headset). But it would be hackable, customizable. You could make it do some actual work for you.

Oh, and it wouldn't lag so terribly as Google Now does. Realtime applications and data over mobile networks don't mix.

"In restricted grammar mode"

That's a key limitation, though.

But we're getting close to the point where you can do some of this. For example - http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.03185.pdf - LSTM speech recognition running on a Nexus 5.

The more serious problem with this is that it's going to be expensive -- and somewhat wasteful. There's a lot of pressure to keep consumer devices as cheap as possible, and the cloud is an awesome way to do that. Having shared cloud-based infrastructure for the speech recognition as opposed to putting it into every device (even though it's only used for ~5 minutes every day) is probably a lot cheaper. Consider the hardware in an Amazon Echo:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Teardown/33953

256MB DRAM and a TI DSP: http://www.ti.com/product/dm3725 with a single Cortex-A8 core (about $23 + a smidgeon for the dram)

vs. a Nexus 5 (2GB DRAM, 4 core 2.2Ghz Krait 400) -- the N5 has roughly 8x the DRAM and compute of the CPU in the Echo.

Would you pay an extra $150 for a LocalEcho that still had to send most of your queries to a search engine for resolution, or to a cloud music service for music? (You & I might, but most consumers wouldn't.)

> "In restricted grammar mode"

> That's a key limitation, though.

Why would it be? Sophisticated exchange of theorems and not essential for this scenario, is it?

Depends if you want to support things like "OK Google, invite Pawel Moczydłowski to my barbecue" and "OK Google, how do you spell d'Artagnan?"

> I'm not buying you couldn't make a decent, self-contained, off-line speech recognition system.

I agree. It's not a problem of technology, it's a problem of incentive. There's no money in developing self-contained, off-line speech recognition system, unfortunately.

> There's no money in developing self-contained, off-line speech recognition system

Nonsense. Self-hosting is highly valued in the enterprise sector. But we're not talking about the sort of products that could be sold to consumers for a few hundred dollars here.

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