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Comment by ggerganov | Hacker News Reader

Recently I made some progress on efficiently detecting short voice commands (wake words) on RPi4 [0]. Checkout the "command" example in whisper.cpp and it's "Guided mode" operation. There are additional improvements on the way too.

[0] https://twitter.com/ggerganov/status/1602759833312456704

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As I said I really appreciate and respect all of the work you’re doing on whisper.cpp but when it comes to things like wake words and commands I have to think Whisper is just fundamentally the wrong tool for the job. Tiny is a 39m parameter model with fairly poor accuracy and high latency (without GPU) that just about maxes out a Raspberry Pi - all for a few a few very carefully pronounced words under ideal conditions (in this case).

That said, there isn’t much in the open source space (that I’ve found) that’s even remotely competitive with Alexa/Echo so I’m all for any efforts and attention in this area. Perfect is the enemy of good but this thread started off with people wondering if Whisper or anything based on it was close to Alexa/Echo for wake word activated assistant tasks. I think it’s very safe to say it isn’t.

Again, I really appreciate your work on making Whisper more accessible to the masses for local ASR - please don’t take this as criticism for your efforts. If anything I’ve been involved in open source projects and it’s frustrating when people try to jam a square peg in a round hole, only to come back and complain your labor of love didn’t work for them.

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