7 ms·

Ask HN: What is an open-source alternative to Google Home?

50 points by holaboyperu 10y ago

I'm wondering what type of technology can be used to build something like Google Home without the privacy concerns from Google or the government listening.

colinramsay 10y ago
There's a project called Jasper [1] that can use a variety of different speech-to-text backends and allows you to write plugins to process commands. For me the biggest issue is actually capturing audio. Something like Google Home or Amazon Echo will have one or more very good microphones in and trying to source those separately ends up being surprisingly expensive. https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/
- b0sk 10y ago
  Looking at Jasper, it uses AT&T or Google or Facebook (wit.ai) as backend (forget the other two, offline speech recognition is hard because it's a data problem and training your models is hard and your performance will be prohibitive). If you intent is privacy, then using the backends offered by AT&T or Google or FB doesn't fly.
  - daveloyall 10y ago
    The point is that Jasper uses the backend you select. But yes, to meet privacy goals, you'll need that backend to be local.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
d135_1r43 10y ago
I think a combination of a Raspberry Pi and http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/ http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/ might be a good start.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
The biggest things right now that I haven't found good replacements for outside of the walled gardens: - The sort of whole room audio microphone setup found in Amazon Echo and Google Home. - Really solid Google-grade speech recognition and hotword detection. - Search.
jbob2000 10y ago
Well, I guess my question to you is, what would this thing do without Google? If you ask it for directions, are you going to build your own mapping engine or just use google maps or another third party solution? If you ask for the latest basketball news, are you going to search google or are you going to build your own web crawler? If you ask it to play your favourite song, where will it play the music from? A local hard disk? A service like spotify, apple music, or youtube? Without Google (or Amazon, if it's the echo), you don't really have much except a voice-to-text box if you want to exclude their services.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Precisely this. There is NO open source alternative to Google. Electricity and equipment to run it will never be free, so there will never by an open source Google.
  - mgbmtl 10y ago
    The same could be said about Wikipedia. If we all chip in (code, governance and money), we can make it happen. I am part of two coops and one LLC that back FOSS projects. I even make a living out of it. There may be data issues (Google can easily buy datasets), software issues (good algorithms and fighting spam) and probably many other issues. Many people probably do not feel enough incentive to re-create Google. It works well enough and is not irritating enough. Then again, search and maps/directions are pretty much the only services I use. For mapping projects that do not require directions, I use OSM-based solutions. For email I use a home-hosted Zimbra VM, for chat I use Mattermost and IRC, for news I use a few websites (most aggregators suck and just become echo-bubbles). etc.
- nightski 10y ago
  Well, you could still use Google services. I think the largest concern is over the active microphone. If you specifically request something that is different. Also it would be nice to have control and choice over which services you use. Maybe Google or Amazon everything isn't the right choice. There's OpenStreetMap, DuckDuckGo, downloaded music... Google is very useful but it is far from the only resource out there. Thinking so would be delusional.
nathan_f77 10y ago
It's really not the same thing, but I've just installed Home Assistant [1], and have been playing around with it today. It automatically picked up my Hue lights and Chromecasts, and I set up presence detection with Locative. For voice recognition, it's just not worth trying to do something yourself. I'm still going to get an Amazon Echo, or maybe the Google Home when it comes out. [1]: https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/
- lima 10y ago
  Or just OpenHAB and the Eclipse Smart Home project. It's a well-established projects attempting to establish a standard for IoT interoperation - and it's working really, really well.
umeboshi 10y ago
Mycroft.ai
- sgarrity 10y ago
  For the lazy: https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/
hiddencost 10y ago
Well, depends on what you want to do. Good far field speech recognition requires on the order of 10k hours of training data to build a good acoustic model for large vocabulary problems. And it needs to be recorded with the same mic set up as you expect at run time. I am continually frustrated by people that think speech recognition is a software problem.
- b0sk 10y ago
  Yep, it's a data problem.
swalsh 10y ago
I'm not sure what it's going to be, but I know we're on the verge of another "Microsoft vs Linux" moment. This is going to be a major OS that almost all people will have in their homes (my echo is older than my son, he is growing up just expecting to be able to ask a computer to do what he wants). Bots will be as natural to him as mobile phones are to Generation Z, and the internet is to Millenials. Right now it seems the proprietary systems are winning the race, which makes sense. Financial incentives are strong... but I firmly believe an open source alternative is better (from a purely capitalistic point of view, I personally compete against amazon... and the further we move from desktops the harder that is). So, if someone asks for funding, and has a good background, i'll throw a few bucks towards them.
- jkestner 10y ago
  The challenge is simple integration across many disparate components, which seems like a rich company's game. The only chance for a open protocol is if it's so cool and immediately useful that people adopt it en masse, a la Snapchat/Whatsapp. Or the market gets regulated. But either of those face a chicken/egg situation because the current market is too small to bother.
- _RPM 10y ago
  Do you really believe that every one will have this in their home?
  - mrtron 10y ago
    Everyone already has one of two options in their pocket.
  - holaboyperu 10y ago
    Steve Jobs believed that everyone will have a computer in every home. So I say ... umm... yes.
  - swalsh 10y ago
    No, I think there are going to be some tech guys who refuse to buy it for "tin foil" reasons. Generally speaking, I think "normal" people will continue to adopt it as the value increases. My own experience though has pretty transformative. My mother, father-in-law, even my wife approached the device with extreme caution. However as they watched me naturally interact with it, they all gradually warmed up to it.... and now it's a must have. The other day I walked into my kitchen, asked Alexa what the weather was outside, but she was unplugged. It was weird... kind of like calling your grandma only to realize she's not alive any more.
bbthorson 10y ago
I would check out www.silklabs.com, they had a pretty successful kickstarter campaign for their device and just open sourced their platform. Former Mozilla people I believe.
miket 10y ago
Check out http://sirius.clarity-lab.org/ http://sirius.clarity-lab.org/
nameless912 10y ago
I was actually thinking about writing one meself. My plan looked something like this: Raspberry Pi with a python script running that does microphone->speech recognition (I was going to use Google's dictation service, but you could do it however you want)->voice-API. The voice API will look something like a regular old REST API does, but for humans: it'll have a bunch of trigger words that would emulate API endpoints (e.g. "play" for music, "turn the lights" for light control, etc.) with the rest of the query being fed as the parameters. And anything that is unrecognized would be assumed to be a question and passed to WolframAlpha or something similar. Has anyone tried something along these lines?
superice 10y ago
Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer at Athom. We at Athom, a smart home startup based in the Netherlands, are releasing the Homey very soon. It features an open app platform based on NodeJS, has support for Z-Wave, 868MHz, 433MHz, Zigbee, IR, WiFi and Bluetooth, not to mention it has some pretty decent voice recognition as well. It isn't strictly speaking open source as the core of our software is proprietary, but we're trying to contribute back to the community on every piece of open source software we do use. We've opened pull requests on various NodeJS projects, we have someone actively working on Linux kernel development (primarily drivers), and every protocol we add support for is open sourced on our GitHub account. We maintain the node-nfc npm module, and are contributors to a handful of other projects. We're about the closest you can come right now to a functioning smart home hub incorporating lots of open source elements, while still having the advantages of corporate backing. Feel free to browse around on our website (http://athom.com/ http://athom.com/) or on our GitHub: https://github.com/athombv https://github.com/athombv
- dsr_ 10y ago
  Here's the basic question: if Athom is purchased by Amazon a year after I buy a Homey, how long will it continue to function after Amazon turns off your servers? (The answer needs to be along the lines of: "the product will be accessible and configurable from the built-in web service and API until the hardware breaks. Extra services provided by Athom subscription will stop working, but you could provide many of them yourself if you have your own server and are competent to read our documentation.")
  - superice 10y ago
    That is pretty much the answer, yes. Sure, some features will break, like out-of-the-box speech to text, but most of the core functionality will continue to work properly, and it definitely won't be a Revolv 2.0 :)
drivingmenuts 10y ago
Problem solved: a dimmer switch. I look at stuff like Google home and wonder what problem they're trying to solve and if they've actually made it disappear or just hidden it behind a wall of ever more complicated marketing. None of it particularly scares me, but the older I get, I think things need to get simpler and a voice-activated, centralized home control system isn't it. Especially when I'm 80 and have enough problems figuring out where my cats hid my glasses (I expect they'll probably have hidden them on my head - sneaky bastards). Literally, the only product of the past decade that I can think of that nailed it was Nest. They decided to replace the thermostat and so they replaced the thermostat. Sure, it ties into your phone and whatnot, but the brains are in the little box you hang on the wall and you don't need the extra connectivity. IoT sounds great, but, yeah. Light switch is simpler. YMMV
markshuttle 10y ago
Mycroft just open sourced their framework. They are using snaps on Ubuntu Core to make an open home voice gateway.

50 points by holaboyperu 10y ago

I'm wondering what type of technology can be used to build something like Google Home without the privacy concerns from Google or the government listening.

colinramsay 10y ago

There's a project called Jasper [1] that can use a variety of different speech-to-text backends and allows you to write plugins to process commands. For me the biggest issue is actually capturing audio. Something like Google Home or Amazon Echo will have one or more very good microphones in and trying to source those separately ends up being surprisingly expensive. https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/

b0sk 10y ago
Looking at Jasper, it uses AT&T or Google or Facebook (wit.ai) as backend (forget the other two, offline speech recognition is hard because it's a data problem and training your models is hard and your performance will be prohibitive). If you intent is privacy, then using the backends offered by AT&T or Google or FB doesn't fly.
- daveloyall 10y ago
  The point is that Jasper uses the backend you select. But yes, to meet privacy goals, you'll need that backend to be local.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

d135_1r43 10y ago

I think a combination of a Raspberry Pi and http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/ http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/ might be a good start.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

The biggest things right now that I haven't found good replacements for outside of the walled gardens: - The sort of whole room audio microphone setup found in Amazon Echo and Google Home. - Really solid Google-grade speech recognition and hotword detection. - Search.

jbob2000 10y ago

Well, I guess my question to you is, what would this thing do without Google? If you ask it for directions, are you going to build your own mapping engine or just use google maps or another third party solution? If you ask for the latest basketball news, are you going to search google or are you going to build your own web crawler? If you ask it to play your favourite song, where will it play the music from? A local hard disk? A service like spotify, apple music, or youtube? Without Google (or Amazon, if it's the echo), you don't really have much except a voice-to-text box if you want to exclude their services.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Precisely this. There is NO open source alternative to Google. Electricity and equipment to run it will never be free, so there will never by an open source Google.
- mgbmtl 10y ago
  The same could be said about Wikipedia. If we all chip in (code, governance and money), we can make it happen. I am part of two coops and one LLC that back FOSS projects. I even make a living out of it. There may be data issues (Google can easily buy datasets), software issues (good algorithms and fighting spam) and probably many other issues. Many people probably do not feel enough incentive to re-create Google. It works well enough and is not irritating enough. Then again, search and maps/directions are pretty much the only services I use. For mapping projects that do not require directions, I use OSM-based solutions. For email I use a home-hosted Zimbra VM, for chat I use Mattermost and IRC, for news I use a few websites (most aggregators suck and just become echo-bubbles). etc.
nightski 10y ago
Well, you could still use Google services. I think the largest concern is over the active microphone. If you specifically request something that is different. Also it would be nice to have control and choice over which services you use. Maybe Google or Amazon everything isn't the right choice. There's OpenStreetMap, DuckDuckGo, downloaded music... Google is very useful but it is far from the only resource out there. Thinking so would be delusional.

nathan_f77 10y ago

It's really not the same thing, but I've just installed Home Assistant [1], and have been playing around with it today. It automatically picked up my Hue lights and Chromecasts, and I set up presence detection with Locative. For voice recognition, it's just not worth trying to do something yourself. I'm still going to get an Amazon Echo, or maybe the Google Home when it comes out. [1]: https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/

lima 10y ago
Or just OpenHAB and the Eclipse Smart Home project. It's a well-established projects attempting to establish a standard for IoT interoperation - and it's working really, really well.

umeboshi 10y ago

Mycroft.ai

sgarrity 10y ago
For the lazy: https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/

hiddencost 10y ago

Well, depends on what you want to do. Good far field speech recognition requires on the order of 10k hours of training data to build a good acoustic model for large vocabulary problems. And it needs to be recorded with the same mic set up as you expect at run time. I am continually frustrated by people that think speech recognition is a software problem.

b0sk 10y ago
Yep, it's a data problem.

swalsh 10y ago

I'm not sure what it's going to be, but I know we're on the verge of another "Microsoft vs Linux" moment. This is going to be a major OS that almost all people will have in their homes (my echo is older than my son, he is growing up just expecting to be able to ask a computer to do what he wants). Bots will be as natural to him as mobile phones are to Generation Z, and the internet is to Millenials. Right now it seems the proprietary systems are winning the race, which makes sense. Financial incentives are strong... but I firmly believe an open source alternative is better (from a purely capitalistic point of view, I personally compete against amazon... and the further we move from desktops the harder that is). So, if someone asks for funding, and has a good background, i'll throw a few bucks towards them.

jkestner 10y ago
The challenge is simple integration across many disparate components, which seems like a rich company's game. The only chance for a open protocol is if it's so cool and immediately useful that people adopt it en masse, a la Snapchat/Whatsapp. Or the market gets regulated. But either of those face a chicken/egg situation because the current market is too small to bother.
_RPM 10y ago
Do you really believe that every one will have this in their home?
- mrtron 10y ago
  Everyone already has one of two options in their pocket.
- holaboyperu 10y ago
  Steve Jobs believed that everyone will have a computer in every home. So I say ... umm... yes.
- swalsh 10y ago
  No, I think there are going to be some tech guys who refuse to buy it for "tin foil" reasons. Generally speaking, I think "normal" people will continue to adopt it as the value increases. My own experience though has pretty transformative. My mother, father-in-law, even my wife approached the device with extreme caution. However as they watched me naturally interact with it, they all gradually warmed up to it.... and now it's a must have. The other day I walked into my kitchen, asked Alexa what the weather was outside, but she was unplugged. It was weird... kind of like calling your grandma only to realize she's not alive any more.

bbthorson 10y ago

I would check out www.silklabs.com, they had a pretty successful kickstarter campaign for their device and just open sourced their platform. Former Mozilla people I believe.

miket 10y ago

Check out http://sirius.clarity-lab.org/ http://sirius.clarity-lab.org/

nameless912 10y ago

I was actually thinking about writing one meself. My plan looked something like this: Raspberry Pi with a python script running that does microphone->speech recognition (I was going to use Google's dictation service, but you could do it however you want)->voice-API. The voice API will look something like a regular old REST API does, but for humans: it'll have a bunch of trigger words that would emulate API endpoints (e.g. "play" for music, "turn the lights" for light control, etc.) with the rest of the query being fed as the parameters. And anything that is unrecognized would be assumed to be a question and passed to WolframAlpha or something similar. Has anyone tried something along these lines?

superice 10y ago

Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer at Athom. We at Athom, a smart home startup based in the Netherlands, are releasing the Homey very soon. It features an open app platform based on NodeJS, has support for Z-Wave, 868MHz, 433MHz, Zigbee, IR, WiFi and Bluetooth, not to mention it has some pretty decent voice recognition as well. It isn't strictly speaking open source as the core of our software is proprietary, but we're trying to contribute back to the community on every piece of open source software we do use. We've opened pull requests on various NodeJS projects, we have someone actively working on Linux kernel development (primarily drivers), and every protocol we add support for is open sourced on our GitHub account. We maintain the node-nfc npm module, and are contributors to a handful of other projects. We're about the closest you can come right now to a functioning smart home hub incorporating lots of open source elements, while still having the advantages of corporate backing. Feel free to browse around on our website (http://athom.com/ http://athom.com/) or on our GitHub: https://github.com/athombv https://github.com/athombv

dsr_ 10y ago
Here's the basic question: if Athom is purchased by Amazon a year after I buy a Homey, how long will it continue to function after Amazon turns off your servers? (The answer needs to be along the lines of: "the product will be accessible and configurable from the built-in web service and API until the hardware breaks. Extra services provided by Athom subscription will stop working, but you could provide many of them yourself if you have your own server and are competent to read our documentation.")
- superice 10y ago
  That is pretty much the answer, yes. Sure, some features will break, like out-of-the-box speech to text, but most of the core functionality will continue to work properly, and it definitely won't be a Revolv 2.0 :)

drivingmenuts 10y ago

Problem solved: a dimmer switch. I look at stuff like Google home and wonder what problem they're trying to solve and if they've actually made it disappear or just hidden it behind a wall of ever more complicated marketing. None of it particularly scares me, but the older I get, I think things need to get simpler and a voice-activated, centralized home control system isn't it. Especially when I'm 80 and have enough problems figuring out where my cats hid my glasses (I expect they'll probably have hidden them on my head - sneaky bastards). Literally, the only product of the past decade that I can think of that nailed it was Nest. They decided to replace the thermostat and so they replaced the thermostat. Sure, it ties into your phone and whatnot, but the brains are in the little box you hang on the wall and you don't need the extra connectivity. IoT sounds great, but, yeah. Light switch is simpler. YMMV

markshuttle 10y ago

Mycroft just open sourced their framework. They are using snaps on Ubuntu Core to make an open home voice gateway.