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Comment by new_guy | Hacker News Reader

Sure you can. Services like Alexa are just glorified paperweights and aren't reflective of real world capabilities.

If you want to build your own Jarvis, don't listen to anyone else just get stuck in. You'll be surprised just how far you can get with it.

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You could also build on top of one of the open source versions, eg Mycroft.

https://mycroft.ai/

That's interesting. Basically the only reason I don't use Alexa or something like this is that I don't want 3rd party listening to me 24/7, so an open source alternative would be of great use. But I don't understand: it says it's open-source, yet the first thing I have to do is to create an account on their platform. So, what's that "open source" thing I ought to download and install, is it just a client? Can I use the thing completely self-hosted?

Also, how does it compare in terms of usability to Alexa/Siri? In fact, I'm not even sure I've seen a good open-source TTS at this point, nothing comparable to proprietary stuff. Is this mycroft thing better?

I've recently started playing with a Home Assistant set up and came across Snips (https://snips.ai/). A bunch of Raspberry Pis with microphones running Snips is what I'm looking to try next. IMO, the offline/on-device processing is a key differentiator.

I haven't tried, but from what I've gathered you can either run it yourself on eg a raspberry pie or use their infrastructure instead if you don't want the hassle and expense. I have the same concerns.

Here's another project btw, which seems less commercial:

https://jasperproject.github.io/

Exactly. They are all developed with the intent to have one party control the apps and partnerships, which in itself limits it's possibilities from the start.

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