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Serious question: is any group working on a voice activated digital assistant for the privacy minded? One that can operate without a connection to a backend net

Serious question: is any group working on a voice activated digital assistant for the privacy minded? One that can operate without a connection to a backend network where it must necessarily transmit recordings of your voice to perform queries? Or is good speech recognition just that intensive, such that common consumer devices really can't handle the load?

honkhonkpants 10y ago
Google's voice recognition usually runs on the device. It works fine on my phone even in "airplane mode".
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Speech recognition is easily trainable outside of the cloud, general purpose recognition is still a bit dicey (all the possible accents that you have to deal with). And even in the cloud its useless.
russjr08 10y ago
I don't think speech recognition is the problem, but rather natural language processing. Google Now for instance can recognize me saying "Set a timer" or "Turn on WiFi" even while airplane mode is enabled, but start adding in context (such as "Who is Bob Marley?" "When was he born?") and it probably wouldn't work.
aksx 10y ago
Not exactly what you are looking for but https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/
dharma1 10y ago
For an AI assistant, check mycroft. Note that there is a lot more to an AI assistant than speech recognition. For just speech recognition you can use Kaldi. Its not hard to deploy on your own server. I've been meaning to package it for Ubuntu phones but haven't gotten around to it yet. Pretty good speech recognition is doable on current mobile hardware. The trained models are large and there is still work ahead shifting the inference to mobile GPUs but it's doable. It also helps if it's integrated into the OS, if you want it to work invisibly with multiple apps.
- walterbell 10y ago
  See also Protonet Zoe, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protonet-zoe-start-your-secure-smart-home-now https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protonet-zoe-start-your-s... with some code at http://experimental-platform.github.io http://experimental-platform.github.io and project background at http://www.curbed.com/2016/3/28/11317418/zoe-smart-home-technology-hub-data-privacy http://www.curbed.com/2016/3/28/11317418/zoe-smart-home-tech....
oulipo 10y ago
We are working on exactly this at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai ! Check this blog post which explains what we are building: https://medium.com/@javimaker/what-apples-privacy-announcement-means-to-you-and-why-it-s-important-we-push-beyond-df7a6ec1c93b#.fy5m3nsxx https://medium.com/@javimaker/what-apples-privacy-announceme... Snips organizes all your information and make it searchable intelligently and actionable fast (it predicts your recurrent patterns so you can order a Uber in one tap)
- adyus 10y ago
  Are you playing with iOS 10's SFSpeechRecognizer & AVSpeechSynthesizer yet? Looking forward to Snips doing much more!
skoocda 10y ago
It depends on your use case. Full conversational speech recognition can't adequately fit in memory on a mobile device, but smaller packages like PocketSphinx can. Kaldi, also mentioned in the comments, can serve various use cases, but again it's limited by the lexicon size. If we're talking Google or Siri-level, it's not fitting onto a device in the near future.

honkhonkpants 10y ago

Google's voice recognition usually runs on the device. It works fine on my phone even in "airplane mode".

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Speech recognition is easily trainable outside of the cloud, general purpose recognition is still a bit dicey (all the possible accents that you have to deal with). And even in the cloud its useless.

russjr08 10y ago

I don't think speech recognition is the problem, but rather natural language processing. Google Now for instance can recognize me saying "Set a timer" or "Turn on WiFi" even while airplane mode is enabled, but start adding in context (such as "Who is Bob Marley?" "When was he born?") and it probably wouldn't work.

aksx 10y ago

Not exactly what you are looking for but https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/

dharma1 10y ago

For an AI assistant, check mycroft. Note that there is a lot more to an AI assistant than speech recognition. For just speech recognition you can use Kaldi. Its not hard to deploy on your own server. I've been meaning to package it for Ubuntu phones but haven't gotten around to it yet. Pretty good speech recognition is doable on current mobile hardware. The trained models are large and there is still work ahead shifting the inference to mobile GPUs but it's doable. It also helps if it's integrated into the OS, if you want it to work invisibly with multiple apps.

walterbell 10y ago
See also Protonet Zoe, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protonet-zoe-start-your-secure-smart-home-now https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protonet-zoe-start-your-s... with some code at http://experimental-platform.github.io http://experimental-platform.github.io and project background at http://www.curbed.com/2016/3/28/11317418/zoe-smart-home-technology-hub-data-privacy http://www.curbed.com/2016/3/28/11317418/zoe-smart-home-tech....

oulipo 10y ago

We are working on exactly this at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai ! Check this blog post which explains what we are building: https://medium.com/@javimaker/what-apples-privacy-announcement-means-to-you-and-why-it-s-important-we-push-beyond-df7a6ec1c93b#.fy5m3nsxx https://medium.com/@javimaker/what-apples-privacy-announceme... Snips organizes all your information and make it searchable intelligently and actionable fast (it predicts your recurrent patterns so you can order a Uber in one tap)

adyus 10y ago
Are you playing with iOS 10's SFSpeechRecognizer & AVSpeechSynthesizer yet? Looking forward to Snips doing much more!

skoocda 10y ago

It depends on your use case. Full conversational speech recognition can't adequately fit in memory on a mobile device, but smaller packages like PocketSphinx can. Kaldi, also mentioned in the comments, can serve various use cases, but again it's limited by the lexicon size. If we're talking Google or Siri-level, it's not fitting onto a device in the near future.