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Comment by oulipo | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm the co-founder of https://snips.ai and we are building a 100% on-device Voice AI platform which runs on the Raspberry Pi 3 It is free to use for makers, and we will start open-sourcing the components a few weeks from now.

We are using Rust because it is safe and very fast!

We would love to tell more about what we are building if you have questions.

The whole platform runs on-device which makes it ideal for privacy, cost, and to allow it to run when there is no network

We are available in English, French, German, and soon Japanese and Korean and we are working on other European languages!

We would love to see what you build with our platform to feature it on our website

Take a look at what some people have built with it: https://github.com/snipsco/awesome-snips

and a few tutorials to get you started: https://medium.com/snips-ai/building-a-voice-controlled-home...

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This sounds very interesting. Being capable of working unconnected is the only way to get true privacy from these devices. Having them open sourced (hopefully 100% though I can understand the reasons for keeping some parts closed) would be even better. I have always been strongly opposed to networked voice assistants because the risk of them being used as spying tools by design is simply too high, And surely no Google, Amazon, Apple etc. assistant will never enter my home, but that one is a different beast. Keep up the good work!

ps. Please add other European languages soon :)

We are working on this! What language would you want?

I'm Italian. There are applications in the automotive field for a mostly disconnected device such as this one. If it can deal with a noisy environment like a car that would make it even more interesting.

We are also working on car environment, and we expect to start italian this year :) Subscribe to our newsletter!

Do you use Deep Learning, HMM or something else for your voice recognition? If so, how did you make it fast on RPi3? Can I use your tech on RPi2 as well (for controlling a humanoid robot)?

Yes, this is a DL model! For the ASR and the wakeword recognition. We are doing some low-level optimizations

For the Raspberry Pi 2 the model is a bit too large, but we will be able to handle them as hubs: your Raspberry Pi 2 in multiple rooms will detect the wakeword and stream the voice to a "hub" Raspberry Pi 3 which will do the speech recognition

what tools you use for building/training DL models? How do you connect them to Rust?

Judging by their employees' posts to the kaldi-help group, they most likely use the Kaldi toolkit.

+1 for fully on-device.

Where, generally, does a company like this get training data? Do you just hire a team to tag TV clips and YouTube videos?

We do a mix of having people generate data, gathering data from public and commercial sources

And another +1 for transparency. This is a product I can get behind.

Rust's algebraic data types and patterns matching allows to write mathematically-complete decisions flows - do you use it?

I signed up for an account and plan on trying it out later, and I just want to say: thank you for explaining what your newsletter is, and for making it opt-in, instead of opt-out.

Are you aware of mycroft.ai? Your goals are similar, but the implementation is different. Any possibility of collaboration.

Hope you still exist in Jan 2021 when I'm getting (hopefully ah) my PhD ;) so I can apply

amazing! Do you have any timelines for portuguese? (And, quite specifically, brazilian portuguese?)

Thanks!

Hi! We have quite a few languages on our plate, but it's very likely we'll work on Brazilian Portuguese before the end of the year.

nice to have projects linked, any live demo ?

Here are a few:

- Music player with Spotify and Sonos: https://vimeo.com/237742054

- News and weather forecasts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFQzDSWr2l0

- Controlling blinds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkOLqcm2CY&t=9s

- Zork game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RX4Dm9TmCY

- Prayer assistant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1AGaYBLzkA&feature=youtu.be

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