Hacker News Reader

Didn't mozilla also have a related speech to text software that got canned/moved to a different company? Or was that different?

View on HN

DeepSpeech? https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech

Mozilla didn't want to fund further development, most of the team ended up at Coqui.ai

Thanks, that's the one I was thinking about. I remembered it had an odd name.

Mozilla shut that project down same day (Apr 12, 2021) as: "Mozilla is partnering with NVIDIA, which is investing $1.5 million in Mozilla Common Voice,". Aka they got paid off by Nvidia to not compete.

DeepSpeech is not competition for NVIDIA, quite the contrary. More people using DeepSpeech means more GPUs sold.

Seems more likely that Mozilla would have shut down both projects, but NVIDIA funding saved the more important one.

Does speech to text require that much compute?

EDIT: Nvm, there seems to be a new project called Sayboard that does everything on your phone:

https://github.com/ElishaAz/Sayboard

(though switching from Swiftkey is a bit annoying)

This is an open dataset of voice samples to train models, so not really STT/TTS software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com