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Comment by neurotech1 | Hacker News Reader

Not disagreeing that hardware is hard, but IMHO Its possible to get a comparable level of AI/DL performance in the "Asteria" device, using relatively available technology like Zynq FPGA[0] based boards like the Parallella[1]. I got my Parallella board from Kickstarter about 2 years ago.

[0] http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-7000...

[1] http://www.parallella.org/

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You're right, the technology is available. But power consumption is another thing altogether. I am assuming the device will be battery powered and the usefulness of some of the sensors, like GPS, drops very quickly if you can't afford to power them on more than a few times a day.

Any wireless radio chip (BLE, Bluetooth, Ant, Wifi), if it needs to be on all the time will also have a huge impact on battery life.

I wish good luck to the Asteria team, and am genuinely curious about how they'll pull it off.

Even if we relax hardware requirements, e.g. assume a Xeon+Titan X hardware, it is still a question if a viable conversational agent that uses deep learning to generate conversations and adapt to surroundings can be developed around it. Maybe it is possible to use DL to extract some meaning vector (or textual description) that is later used by conventional NLP chatbot to converse with user. I wonder if the quality will be good enough.

Also we don't know if the company will really develop their product to fruition, they may simply develop a good (but not viable as a product) demo and be acqui-hired by one of big players.

I've got a parallella knocking about not doing anything. Did anyone write any interesting software for it in the end, that's worth putting it to use?

I think some people did, but I mainly used mine as a FPGA dev board. $99 Zynq board is still good value, even without using the custom Epiphany processor.

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