Hacker News Reader

A bit OT:

What's up with the animated drawing on your front page of an alien poorly disguised as a human female at a picnic using voice to control her music player? It's kind of distracting--I keep staring at it instead of reading the site.

I infer that she's an alien for three reasons.

First, her head is on backwards compared to human heads.

Second, she appears to have only one upper arm, attached to her left shoulder, which forks at the elbow into two lower arms, one of which is going behind her back over to her right side. The forearms are also about twice as long as human forearms.

Third, the neck is way longer than human necks, but quite consistent with many the aliens some people have claimed to have seen.

Seriously...is this some recognized art style? I don't know much about art, but I do recall that around the late 19th/early 20th century there were some prominent artists and styles that took big liberties with human anatomy.

It's well drawn sufficiently (as are the other drawings on your site) that it gives the impression that the artist is referencing something known.

Looks somewhat like surrealism to me.

That's a really creepy design.

Ha ツ - thought the same thing when someone shared this site at work

https://twitter.com/whitingx/status/978983203024318464

> I'm a co-founder of https://snips.ai and we are building a 100% on-device and private-by-design platform to build Voice AI assistants

Excellent! How will you guarantee that your devices will not leak data?

We are open-sourcing the code, and people can have their own network monitoring to see that there is no data leaking

Please check into 'reproducible builds' and ways to ensure the software is not modified between the point where you build it and the point where it gets deployed. There will most likely at some point be an attempt to use your reputation to achieve the exact opposite of your stated goals so beware of that.

We'd love to hear more about what you think of this, perhaps you can contact me mael.primet@snips.ai and I would love to do a Skype with you, if only because I read quite a few of your posts over the year and am curious to know you.

We are providing the source, and people can rebuild it from scratch and ensure that their device is running the open-source code. In theory, it is each user who should deploy his device. If an industrial partners want to ship our software to many devices, indeed it will be needed for them to prove he hasn't modified the software and we are happy to learn about best practices to help them do so, so we will look at this

I'm sorry, I don't do skype or hangouts but I'll be happy to email with you. However, it is probably better if you find someone who is really an expert in the field. But I can definitely see that there is a potential problem here if you are open sourcing your code and industrial partners ship your software without some kind of clear way in which you can ascertain that what got shipped is what you intended and not some kind of perverted variation.

This might be a good starting point:

https://reproducible-builds.org/

> If an industrial partners want to ship our software to many devices, indeed it will be needed for them to prove he hasn't modified the software and we are happy to learn about best practices to help them do so, so we will look at this

Yea, as a privacy conscious user this would be the attack vector that I’d be most nervous about. “Partners” taking the open source engine and loading it up with surveillance. Being able to re-compile and deploy a vanilla version from source is critical. There are a lot of “smart” devices out there that I would buy if only I had root and/or could decide what software ran on it.

Will the device have any components in it which require proprietary firmware? Think long and hard about that before answering.

edit: I thought you were also doing something similar to Mycroft and their 'mark 1' thing. I was wrong.

Our platform doesn't require any specific component.

It will be open-source and free for all users to use and create assistants.

If an industrial device maker wants to use the open-source version and add to it proprietary components, it will be his decision and he should inform his customers.

The best we can do when building and open-sourcing our assistant platform is to make it possible for commercial vendors to create state-of-the-art private-by-design voice assistants if they want

So no components in your device (e.g. for wifi) require proprietary firmware to function? Are you sure about that?

They make software, not hardware, they could not make such a guarantee.

Ah, I didn't realize that. I thought they were trying to do something like Mycroft with the Mark 1. Mycroft releases their platform to be installed on other devices, but they also make their own (Mark 1).

I spent like 60 seconds on your page trying to figure out what exactly you do and failed. Just saying.

Put some of the information of your posts here on your page and things would be much clearer.

"and people can have their own network monitoring"

Is this monitoring built into your product? If not, wouldn't a user of any AI assistant have this same ability?

The monitoring is to see if the product is making network connections, you can do that with any AI assistant, yes, but the Google and Amazon products are going to require you to allow them to make those connections. This claim is that you can see that this product isn't making connections. (I think)

You can use a tool like `mitmproxy` to monitor the network requests

Have you run into any problems improving or training your algorithm if you're limiting the data it has access to? What are some of the things you've done that make you "wish" you could be an online off-device tool?

I ask because most of what we hear is that online tools will get better over time because you are sharing your data. How do you work around this, or is that even an obstacle?

There are many ways to work around this, we do data augmentation and data generation to create more data

Although the user who complained about your using HN to post about this broke the guidelines by being uncivil, they do appear to have a point: it looks like you've been using HN exclusively to promote your own stuff. That's not what the site is for.

There's nothing wrong with posting links to your own work when it's relevant, but please don't use HN only for this. The site is intended for intellectual curiosity, i.e. submitting, reading, and commenting on stories that you run across and personally find interesting. So if you use it exclusively for promotion, you're not really participating in the community as intended. Does that make sense?

Oh, this looks cool. I was looking into building something with a respeaker not too long ago. How does your business model work that you're letting people DIY for free?

We are selling licenses for industrial builders.

If you build something with it, we would love to hear about it and feature it on our website! Come talk to us on our Discord channel :)

Any reasons to choose Discord over Slack?

Wondering as we have to make a similar decision for our startup.

A USB microphone... That's a bummer. I was hoping that Zigbee or Z-wave based mics already exist. Do they? Every time I look at the landscape of home automation it's really hard to avoid clouds and Wifi.

I had problems setting up Snips on an RPI - couldn't figure out how to read the MQTT bus messages after I set up the audio successfully. Where do I go for help?

Hi! You can either send us an issue on Github https://github.com/snipsco/snips-platform-documentation/issu... or better come talk to us on our Discord channel: https://discordapp.com/invite/3939Kqx

what's your business model if everyone can download and build their own image, or even re-distribute that in their own products?

as far as Alexa goes, I unplugged it a few months ago and it's collecting dust now, I use my cellphone to check weather and for alarm clock instead, I don't see much use for Alexa other than those two simple tasks.

We are selling licenses for industrial makers

> far as Alexa goes, I unplugged it a few months ago and it's collecting dust now

Ha, I got a google home mini free as part of some promotion, and I haven't even broken the shrink wrap. I need to find a way to sell that thing for a few bucks before it becomes outdated, because I sure have no interest in it.

any plans to integrate with https://www.home-assistant.io/ ?

We have an integration with Home Assistant and are now working on making this even easier, stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter to be informed when the integration is complete

"Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter."

Snips + Home Assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/components/snips/

> I'm a co-founder of https://snips.ai

Yes, we know. You post to literally every voice-assistant related comment thread. If you aren't a bot, you must have a (voice powered?) bot sniffing out threads to post on.

If you're going to do that, please at least learn the difference between a disclaimer and a disclosure. :sigh: