Sirius – Open Source Siri/Cortana Alternative for Linux | Hacker News Reader

Sirius – Open Source Siri/Cortana Alternative for Linux

clarity-lab.org

74 pointssteviee19 comments

Sirius would be a cool name if Siri didn't exist.

I'm just imagining if Linux was called something like Winds. It makes the whole thing look like a cheap copy of the original.

Sorry, I can't take that sirius. Change the name!

That was my first reaction as well. It's also bad because of Sirius radio.

Seriously (pun intended), come up with your own name!

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:siBjE2U...

They also link to this paper: http://clarity-lab.org/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/hauswal...

It describes the system as a hidden Markov model combined with either a deep neural network or a Gaussian mixture model which compute the probability of state transitions, based on which the Viterbi algorithm computes the most likely path in the tree, a sentence.

Whilst this is a great idea which I look forward to watching progress, Sirius doesn't seem like the best name for this. It's very close to an existing industry product in the same category and Apple certainly don't hold back in trademark litigation.

You may be right... but "Siri" itself is a riff on "SRI", as in "Stanford Research Institute" or "SRI International".

Apple could use their money to try to take down an open source university project, which would certainly foster goodwill for them, and it would probably draw attention to Siri's DARPA roots, which would also be some doubleplusgood publicity for them.

They might be better off just not spending the money and buying back more of their stock.

All I hear is "Harry Potter's Godfather"....

Also don't forget the satellite radio service that merged with XM radio. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Satellite_Radio

Well, this is more distant. If we're at it, it is also the name of a particle accelerator in Brazil: http://www.lightsources.org/news/2015/02/21/sirius-%E2%80%93...

It doesn't matter in the US. A large company will take you through the ringer if there is any possibility of confusion even if they may not have a claim.

Hey Apple, time to sue!

some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9204954

I'm really curious how well this works. If it does, it sounds like a great starting point for building your own speech control systems -> most other open-source solutions rely on online speech recognition services (mostly google's)

Given all speech recognition systems except Google's kind of suck, I'm going to guess it doesn't work very well.

You need a huge training database and a priori information (i.e. what are people likely to be saying; think Google autocomplete) to do it really well. They have neither.

I notice an almost accidental reference to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

http://hitchhikersguidetoearth.wikia.com/wiki/Sirius_Cyberne...

I wish they'd use a standard build system and not a bunch of home-made unportable scripts, so it would be a bit easier to give this thing a try.

https://github.com/jhauswald/sirius

Has anyone tried this installing on their laptops and checked how it works?

I use OSX and some installation FAQ would have been nice for me. Even after reading multiple times, I can't understand whether I should install Sirius or Sirius Suite.

nice name: sirius = siri + us

I like this effort a lot, and I think it would be really interesting to fork it and make a personal version that people could customize with their own information and thought processes.

This is my favorite aspect of the university system; I have no problems with innovation through free market capitalism and profit motive, but its nice that there is university infrastructure to support researchers and provide balance for the times when profit motive is not enough. It is a shame that many aspects of university have just become glorified vocational school debt machines.

Any opinion on Kaldi vs RASR? (their open speech recognition technologies)

Looks like they got too much traffic due to Hn :/ http://i.imgur.com/A2K9mDr.png

Why so Sirius?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

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