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Comment by dopamean | Hacker News Reader

Are there any assistants that aren't connected to the web? Or at least aren't by default. Here are some things I'd love to be able to do that don't need the web.

    Set a timer
    Set a reminder for something in X minutes
    Take a voice note
    Create lists (maybe could be pushed to phone via bluetooth)
    Maybe some home auto stuff

I imagine most of this stuff could be shared to my phone via bluetooth if I needed it on the go (like a shopping list).

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The biggest challenge is the voice recognition. There are a variety of open source projects. The Mozilla one is likely the most promising option at the moment. Kaldi and Sphinx are a couple of others. It's probably fair to say that nothing in the space is a "product" at the moment and would likely require a full PC to run as well.

I played around a bit to see if I could put together a standalone timer but didn't get very far.

If you want to roll your own server I believe there is a plugin for Home Assistant that can take voice input. https://home-assistant.io/

But I don't think either the Echo or the Google Home will connect to that. If you are running home assistant on a raspberry Pi, you could probably build that right into your own speaker.

I believe Julius and PocketSphinx do not require internet connections and may be able to perform some of this stuff if you were running your own server: http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/configuration/#...

https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice

You control what goes where.

As I understand it, all the voice assistants rely on a backend to do the voice processing, at a minimum.

There are several freely available voice datasets.

https://voice.mozilla.org/data

If everyone who reads HN commits a little time to Mozilla Common Voice in 2018, we might have a non-cloud solution in 2019.

This is awesome. Thank you for pointing me in this direction. This kind of corpus is going to be extremely important to getting a more diverse array of voice applications out there in the open.

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