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Comment by amai | Hacker News Reader

There is an alternative to the spying devices of Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft:

"Our technology runs on-device, works offline and guarantees Privacy by Design"

Been using snips in 3 different rooms in my home for about a year now, hooked into home assistant, with many custom actions that I specifically made for my apartment. I LOVE being able to control my apartment without the need for the internet.

Too bad local control seems to be a luxury these days, rather than the standard.

I can't believe that so many people, especially the ones on tech sites like this, bought into the idea that speech recognition is such a hard job that it needs to be run on the supercomputers of tech giants. We had somewhat decent voice dictation software on desktops 20 years ago, when 100Mhz processors and 32MB of RAM were top of the line, yet now it's impossible with an order of magnitude more resources.

The main reason this kind of thing is outsourced to the cloud nowadays is because of deep neural network voice recognition technologies we have. Most of these models are too hefty to run inference on-device. Also, online learning allows for STT to get better as it’s used more if it’s centralized in a place like the cloud.

My iPhone runs machine vision on my phone at night (locked, plugged in, on wifi) to determine which people are in which photos. My iPhone.

That's true. I didn't realize that when I wrote my comment (from an iPhone, haha).

Your iPhone is also a $1k device that's faster than some laptops. And it still cant do convincing on-device text to speech a-la Google Tacotron, and its NLU capabilities _even in the cloud_ leave much to be desired.

Much of the cost of the iPhone is in the screen, battery, form factor and fashion accessory premium. Take that away and your much closer to raspberry pi territory.

It's closer to Apple TV territory maybe, that custom CPU inside costs a pretty penny to design and manufacture.

Can one not do machine learning on a RaspberryPi with an FPGA shield?

FPGA on which it is worthwhile to do deep learning costs more than the iPhone, and consumes a lot more power. Your best option starting next year will be sub-$100 Chinese chips with a TPU-like unit built in. The only one I know of is RK3399Pro, which was supposed to come out this year, but didn't make it, apparently because the die had to be larger than they planned.

20 years ago you spoke directly into a microphone and could only use an extremely limited set of supported languages and locales/accents.

You're also missing the point. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that speech recognition can only be done on supercomputers. Your laptop can surely run one of these models (though it would take a long time to train one). But there's a reason why an Echo Dot cost $20 and not $1000.

A Raspberry Pi can run Snips. I don't know how long it takes to train or how well it works.

How does this device grab the current weather and buy things offline?

It can get data from the internet, I think the point is that it "lives" on-device and hence can be interacted with offline, unlike Siri/Alexa/Cortana which live entirely on the company's servers.

Siri/Alexa/Cortana are assistants, while the part you are talking about is speech recognition. Sure, it’s great that this is done offline, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare it to more services because at that point you do need to get data from the internet just like any other service.

I would say your comment was the unfair one. Sure, it cannot tell the weather without internet. But it can still do plenty of more important home automation functions, namely automation. No one owns one of these home assistants for it to tell the weather. You get it for controlling other devices with your voice and this can do that without access to thr world wide web.

Voice Control in iOS can do some of this. It’s older than HomeKit, though, so it can’t do home automation-it’s limited to running commands on-device.

I believe the intention is providing a voice recognition system you can use to interface with other things, like APIs. Products from Big Data (in my usage like Big Oil, Big Tobacco, etc.) offer convenience at the cost of privacy. For many people, this is a minor trade-off. For others, alternatives with perhaps less convenience.

I think it’s misleading to sell this as a “privacy-focused AI” (specifically, similar to Siri or Google Assistant) when it’s really an offline speech recognition tool. This keeps the “privacy” part accurate, and makes it clear that intents are still being sent out from the device (as opposed to audio recordings).

Is it good?

I’m excited for the day when it is!

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