Hacker News Reader

Comment by oulipo | Hacker News Reader

I'm a co-founder of Snips https://snips.ai, we are building a 100% on-device Voice AI platform which protects your privacy as it does not rely on sending voice on servers like Google and Apple do

You can use the platform for free (we will also open-source over time), it can run on Raspberry 3 and we added an integration with the amazing Home Assistant: https://home-assistant.io/components/snips

View on HN

> (we will also open-source over time)

One tip is to use GPLv3, which would force the users of your code, who would put the software on their hardware, to make it possible for their users to reflash the devices. For everyone who doesn't want to allow that you could offer a commercial license.

This way of open sourcing works quite well for example for the Qt Company, they sell commercial licenses to automobile companies which don't want people to reflash their in vehicle infotainment systems for some reason, so they pay a per device commercial license. The Qt Company takes the money and pays developers to keep on working on the free software version of Qt which is GPLv3.

Kind of win win for everyone, small users who play with the sofware on their raspberry pi get the source code and big companies with their own propriatary hardware would pay licenses.

This is a blog post on how to integrate Snips with Home Assistant to build your own 100% on-device Voice AI for home automation https://medium.com/snips-ai/integrating-snips-with-home-assi...

This is a blog post on how to create your own custom assistants https://medium.com/snips-ai/build-a-weather-assistant-with-s...

Can you recommend a far field microphone for use with your project?

Or really one as good as or better than those in the echo dot would be amazing, because that is what my baseline is right now.

We are using a ReSpeaker, and we made a blog post to benchmark some microphones at https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-microphone-arrays-r...

Z Wave is supported but is zigbee? Zigbee hardware tend to be quite a bitcheaper and have has a wider range of devices.

I'm controlling zigbee devices with hass via a lightify hub, and I know there are other supported methods as well.

EDIT: clarified that I am using homeassistant to talk to the lightify hub.

You guys are even using Rust for some of your projects on Github [0]. Yay :).

[0]: https://github.com/snipsco

We love Rust :)

> which protects your privacy as it does not rely on sending voice on servers like Google and Apple do

And on your website:

> The First On-Device Voice Platform

Android already has on-device voice recognition. Just try getting in airplane mode and saying "OK Google, play music" or something that does not require being online.

Yes, but their business model is still to get and sell your data to advertiser

We do a 100% on-device platform, where your data never leaves the platform, and we want to power the next generation of private-by-design smart IoT devices

Sigh

How many times do we have to do this? Google isn't selling your data to advertisers.

How many times do we have to do what?

Google is absolutely selling your data to advertisers.

If you mean they won't sell it to them in raw form I guess you're technically correct, and I'd of course agree with you, but I don't think this is the parent posters point.

They aren't being altruistic by not doing this; if they did they wouldn't be able to monetize it anymore.

Am I misunderstanding something here or are you just being pedantic?

It's the same reason I'm an iPhone user. I'd rather deal with a company whose business model is to sell me overpriced hardware rather than to "sell my data to advertisers"

I just watched an interview with Trump where the interviewer asked about the possibility of regulating tech and specifically mentioned all the info these large tech companies are gathering and "selling" our data. While it may be considered pedantic, I think the nuance is important. Fake news often has a kernel of truth in it and being sloppy about the facts has implications.

Here on HN, we know the specifics, but FOX viewers don't (for the most part).

Sure, but the Google platform is still in the cloud.

Can apps/services hook into that?

How are you able to improve the training over time if you aren't centralizing the data anywhere?

We have many methods, but mostly voice and text can be trained offline and we refine it online with methods that can train on the device

Allow people to explicitly opt in to send training data to them, or otherwise generate their own training data through volunteers.

Thank you. What is the accuracy of recognition? Does accuracy improve overtime, if so how?

The accuracy is actually very good, and will improve a lot with the new models in the next release you can test them for yourself by downloading the platform which is free!

thank you for your work on this, I was thinking last week of nice to have assistant like echo or google, but I don't trust either company

Thank you :)

> (we will also open-source over time)

What portion of it is currently open source?

We have a few open-source repositories now, but we will start open-sourcing more during next year

Reply on news.ycombinator.com