Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlgeek | Hacker News Reader

Spoiler: Unlike what you'd expect, this project has no voice recognition or response - it's just a touch-screen that shows weather/calendar/etc.

View on HN

Yeah not intending to downplay what the author created, but the voice recognition and voice commands are kind of the key advertised feature of Alexa, so calling something without those an "Alexa knockoff" is a stretch at best.

Agreed, title should be edited.

Also agree. I get it if the author wanted a catchy title, because you want your work to be read, but the line between this and clickbait is a fine one.

> voice recognition and voice commands

Nor are they that hard to do with the right libraries

Unless things have changed a lot in the past few months, they actually are pretty limited locally at this point. Certainly you can do them, but you can't them particularly well.

Things are always changing and I'd be curious what you're basing that claim on.

wav2letter can transcribe locally and well.

Mostly from playing a bit with Sphinx and loosely following the space. But as you say things are always changing.

I will note that different people have different definitions of "good" in this space. For example, I've used online services like otter.ai and, while they're useful for certain purposes, they're still much worse than a human for transcribing. They're certainly not worth my time to clean them up to publish an actual transcript.

but for something like Alexa which is designed to recognize specific commands it would be easy to design something with relatively good accuracy

I have not tried the other [otter.ai] service but even with speech to text on my iPhone, which to note is not running luckily [locally], it seems pretty accurate at transcribing what i say

^ the above was transcribed on an iPhone and the errors are bracketed.

More likely he is clueless about what Alexa offers. It isn't just Voice Recognition, but also integration into many other devices that I can control.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com