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Show HN: Snips is a AI Voice Assistant platform 100% on-device and private
- TeMPOraL 9y agoGreat! Glad to see someone doing IoT the right way! What's the pricing though? I have an impression this is a paid product, but no pricing info is present. EDIT: also, in trained_assistant.json, what does "tfidf_vectorizer_vocab" represent, and why it includes words like "nazi" and "hitler"? ;).
- IanCal 9y agoAs far as I can tell, it's free for personal use, and paid if you want to build a product with it. Seems very interesting, reminds me of wit.ai when I first started using it, but the training seems to work pretty well from some small examples (which I had trouble with using wit).
- throwanem 9y agoBased on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf–idf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf–idf , I'd tend to surmise that whatever corpus was used for training included those words.
- oulipo 9y agoThe product is free for personal use, and paid when you are selling devices
- jd20 9y agoI was also hunting for pricing info, before deciding if I wanted to pursue something like this further. Is it determined on a case-by-case basis, or same for everyone? If same, any reason not to publish it somewhere on the website?
- oulipo 9y agoWe are still evolving the exact pricing, so you should tell us about you and we will see what would be the best way to work together, we are happy about helping as many makers as we can ! contact us at contact@snips.ai
- oulipo 9y agoThe product is free for makers, and paid for commercial usage
- bsaul 9y agoglad to see snips finally releasing a product after all those years...
- oulipo 9y agoI'm a co-founder of Snips, we are building a private-by-design Voice Assistant platform which allows companies and makers to build a smart assistant 100% on-device. Why do we do this? We want assistants of the future to respect user privacy, and not stream your voice or your most important questions to servers that you do not control. With Snips, 100% of what we do runs on the device (the platform ships for Raspberry Pi, more platforms are available for entreprise customers, contact@snips.ai) We are using state-of-the-art deep-learning Automated Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding to allow makers to plug a voice assistant in their device in 5 minutes. We are actually benchmarked our NLP and are outperforming most of the commercially available NLU providers: https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-natural-language-understanding-systems-google-facebook-microsoft-and-snips-2b8ddcf9fb19 https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-natural-language-un...
- IshKebab 9y agoThat is a great benchmark. Can you give a rough idea of how your NLU works? Or some keywords to search?
- mtw 9y agoIt would be great to have a hands-on tutorial on how a developer or user could set this up to control speakers or a magic mirror like this https://github.com/HannahMitt/HomeMirror https://github.com/HannahMitt/HomeMirror :)
- mfester 9y ago
- Jaruzel 9y agoI couldn't find a video of it in action (things like response delay are quite important to me) on the actual site, but managed to dig this up on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wThoRtIeExo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wThoRtIeExo
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stedaniels 9y ago@oulipo why is this video not discoverable on your site? There should be a lot more videos like it!
- oulipo 9y agoThanks, we are working on adding more content on the website, you can also subscribe to the newsletter to be informed when we add some DIY tutorials to build cool assistants!
- stedaniels 9y agoI'm especially interested in the synergy between the voice/intent recognition and what was being displayed on the tablet. Is that part of the platform? Or something else?
- oulipo 9y agoThis is part of the platform, which has been built to be open and extensible, we will release a mobile app which allows makers to easily interact with their device and see what the platform is recognizing when users are talking to it !
- rhindi 9y agoEvery component publishes a message on the local network, so you can have other devices like an iPad capture the output
- jhewitt123 9y agoCool, I have been experimenting with Google's VoiceHAT board, and the Picroft open source voice control from Mycroft which runs on Pi, both of which are fairly straightforward to set up to control real world devices. How does one do this in Snips?
- oulipo 9y agoYou can code any handler you want using your favorite language, the output of the Natural Language Understanding is sent on a MQTT bus you need to add a MQTT listener in your code (there are many libraries in many languages), you can see an example on the documentation https://github.com/snipsco/snips-platform-documentation/wiki/2.-Running-your-first-end-to-end-assistant https://github.com/snipsco/snips-platform-documentation/wiki...
- jhewitt123 9y agoNot very familiar with MQTTother then that a few micro boards I use like the ESP8266 can comeready for it. I mean just set up a voice key word to toggle a pin on the raspberry Pi to control a relay. With the VoiceHAT you just setup a word in a Python program, simple. In Picroft, you do a similar thing. Here I toggle an LED with the VoiceHAT; for example, https://plus.google.com/115226830543207487087 https://plus.google.com/115226830543207487087
- oulipo 9y agoIt is the same with our platform, you can bind to the "hotword detected" message and run the code you want
- jhewitt123 9y agoI'd love to try it out, just don;t know how to doit honesty, nor how to add an MQTT handlerfor that matter. I can install and run programs on the Pi, and wire relays to pins, that's about it.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y agoThe voice and confirmation sounds in the later part of the video reminded me of Siri. Is that resemblance intentional? Or is this only in the demo video to give Apple an idea of how this compares to Siri (subconsciously pushing for an acquisition)? Edit: I’m referencing the demo video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wThoRtIeExo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wThoRtIeExo
- oulipo 9y agoWe used an open-source library of sounds :)
- overdunk 9y agoSnips is an AI not a AI
- oulipo 9y agoThanks!
- KaiserPro 9y agoOoo, the intent interface is brilliant I've been struggling with alexa and google assistant, to make something useful for embedding. So much backwards and forwards with setting up infrastructure for skills. This is smashing.
- taoice 9y agoi wait japanese language support
- noonespecial 9y agoAhh. Finally a realistic chance of cleanly adding "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." to my benchtop drink dispenser project. The future is so cool. 1990's childhood me approves greatly.
- oulipo 9y agoWe'd love you to build the best Tea Serving intent on the platform, play with it !
- CaptSpify 9y agoMaybe I'm missing the obvious, but where's the source? I don't see a link anywhere?
- bpicolo 9y agoDoesn't appear that the product is open source, though some building blocks are. https://github.com/snipsco https://github.com/snipsco
- rhindi 9y agoWe will be open sourcing it gradually over the year
- Sir_Substance 9y agoI'm keenly looking forward to that, I've been looking for something like this for a while. Lucida looked nice on the surface, but once you get it running there's not a lot there. I'm part of the "privacy and security" demographic. The thing you've got to understand about us is that we've been burned before, many times, by closed source products that are allegedly local only, but are secretly snitching behind our backs. Market penetration may be difficult until people can see the source. If you're looking for a business model to attach to this, I recommend holding the training data in reserve as your paid product, and open sourcing the platform.
- CaptSpify 9y agoCool. Is there a way I can get notified once it is fully open? I'm guessing there's not a large demographic of people who want privacy-focused software, but don't care if it's closed source.
- oulipo 9y agoYou can subscribe to the newsletter and get information about cool DIY posts on our blog and the new features!
- spitfire 9y agoAre there plans to extend this to a multi-turn (goal based) agent? It's nice to have single turn interactions for turning the lights on. But not so nice for Eg: booking a complex flight, or navigating unknown options.
- oulipo 9y agoYes! there is a first version of dialog, and the next version will allow multiple turns and customizable dialog!
- spitfire 9y agoHow are you building out multi-turn/goal based approaches? hardcoding a rule engine, or something clever?
- oulipo 9y agoThe first version is hardcoded, the next version will allow custom behavior designed by the users Over time we want to add full dialog capacity to the AI
- spitfire 9y agoHN won't let me respond to your comment. When I meant hardcoded I meant hardcoded or rule based system rather than a generalized dialog manager with Knowledgeable lookup. Sounds like you're not there yet.
- dlwdlw 9y agoWhat is preventing the bigger players from having on device voice assistants as well?
- RugnirViking 9y agoThe fact that they perform worse, given they have constraints like size of memory/hard disk and speed of processing to worry about. The only real argument for on-device is privacy, which most people don't care for
- slackingoff2017 9y agoYou can't make endless money off something people can buy. Don't worry, as long as you pay rent the cloudlords are great.
- oulipo 9y agoNothing, except they never cared about this. We want to do AI and privacy right from the start, so we are committed to building AI with state-of-the-art performance which protects the users
- MikeKusold 9y agoI'm extremely tired of seeing "Coding since age 8", especially on a company about page[0]. It'd be like an artist having a macaroni collage that they made during kindergarten in their portfolio. [0] https://snips.ai/about/ https://snips.ai/about/
- oulipo 9y agoBut it's true! And my first language was actually Pascal and then assembly :) I had the chance of having some family working around computers at the time, and showing me how to code multiplication tables while I was learning them at school
- xfer 9y agoI don't see anything wrong with either. It shows passion.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- knodi123 9y agoIf one kid is doing macaroni-level coding while everyone else is literally gluing noodles, that's still a pretty strong predictor of future skills.
- mazamats 9y agoI'd argue that programming requires much more critical thinking than macaroni art
- BadThink6655321 9y agoiOS support?
- s_maury 9y agoWe are working to add support for various platforms, including iOS & macOS sure! Stay tune on our site.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fpgaminer 9y agoThis is exactly what I was looking for a few months ago. I wanted to build a voice activated gym assistant, mostly to help me track my sets, reps, and breaks. I was hoping to have it all on-device using a Raspberry Pi, but I didn't find anything great. It ended up being "easier" to use Google Cloud for speech recognition (easier in quotes, because dealing with Google's APIs is never easy). Shelved that project while I was busy working on other things. This has me excited to give it another go!
- johanneskanybal 9y agoWe all want this. Guess since I'm on parental leave it's my duty to try it out.
- stuaxo 9y agoGreat! I've been thinking for a while we need compelling examples of offline functionality and along this comes.
- yellowapple 9y agoA source code release (even under a non-free license) would be much appreciated for those of us who would rather actually attempt to build this for non-RPi platforms ourselves than wait for the vendor to get around to it (if they get around to it at all). Right now, there doesn't seem to be anything aside from the RPi build (the download page for which also requires me to login with my email address, so I didn't proceed to actually download it). That's a shame.
- Ekami 9y agoLast time I was at a machine learning meetup where Rand gave a speech about the features of your framework he told us that for the speech recognition part you were using Google/Apple APIs, only the NLP/NLU would be handled by you. Is it still the case? Because I don't think Google does "privacy by design" and when someone sells me a product with that brand I expect it to be 100% private, not half private.
- s_maury 9y agoNow we have developed our own Speech to Text component, all offline. We have only support for US English for the moment but we are working to support more languages. Feel free to try it on our web site!