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I'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-dev
by oulipo 9y ago
I'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 agoYes absolutely. In fact we created a dedicated Labs team within Snips (check out http://labs.snips.ai http://labs.snips.ai) with that in mind: to create DIY hacks, proof-of-concepts, benchmarks and related material for the community. We are just getting started, and have published our first post on building a connected speaker: https://medium.com/snips-ai/how-to-build-a-voice-controlled-speaker-that-protects-your-privacy-ec6429a2c673 https://medium.com/snips-ai/how-to-build-a-voice-controlled-.... Stay tuned, many more are coming over the next months.
- paulsutter 9y agoWill you publish the model model and Tensorflow source? Or is this just a binary install?
- oulipo 9y agoThanks! We are committed to open-source and transparency and we want to open-source most of the major inference component of our platform! We started doing some open-source that you can look at on Github now https://medium.com/snips-ai https://medium.com/snips-ai
- paulsutter 9y agoI found your github[1] which includes platform documentation[2] and various API code but I didn't see any trained weights or Tensorflow models. Some users might want to extend the model and open source could be a great way to get momentum behind your platform. [1] https://github.com/snipsco/ https://github.com/snipsco/ [2] https://github.com/snipsco/snips-platform-documentation https://github.com/snipsco/snips-platform-documentation
- thro1237 9y agowhat kind of microphone do you recommend for pi?
- oulipo 9y agoMany microphones can work because our ASR is robust, ideally you want a microarray with noise cancelling
- mediocrejoker 9y agoCould you link to a "microarray" microphone that's available for purchase?
- mfester 9y agoHere is what we've been playing with: - Matrix Creator: https://creator.matrix.one/ https://creator.matrix.one/ - ReSpeaker: https://www.seeedstudio.com/s/respeaker.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/s/respeaker.html - Conexant: http://conexant.com http://conexant.com (quite expensive, but powerful) We are also waiting for the Matrix Voice, still on Indiegogo, due late Summer: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/matrix-voice-open-source-voice-platform-for-all#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/matrix-voice-open-source-.... As mentioned earlier, we will soon release a benchmark of the various mic array solutions, as well as tutorials for setting them up.
- stedaniels 9y agoThe Matrix Voice seems the most affordable... for makers that is :-)
- skykooler 9y agoIs this a homebrew speech recognition engine, or are you using something existing like sphinx/julius/kaldi?
- JustFinishedBSG 9y agoDo you just magically happen to take CIFRE Thésards in NLP/Machine Learning?
- oulipo 9y agoSure you can apply to https://snips.ai/jobs https://snips.ai/jobs !
- mattcoles 9y agoIs there potential for a MIPS build? Would be excited to try this out on an Onion Omega.
- oulipo 9y agoWe are working on expanding the platforms, stay tuned!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- taneq 9y agoThis is awesome. Every other assistant AI type product seems to be designed primarily as a pretext for invading its users' privacy. Thanks for building something that might be both useful and trustworthy at the same time!
- oulipo 9y agoThanks! And we take privacy very seriously, as should most companies now because the people will ask for this in the future. No reason Google should know what you ask your Voice Assistant to buy, or to remind you of!
- _jal 9y agoDitto. I still have no idea if I'm actually interested in voice UI, but I'd actually experiment with this one, unlike any existing implementation. Edit - any other existing implementation.
- natch 9y agoYou should take a look at what Apple is doing if you think that. Especially the developments announced last week. Going forward I would expect to see a vast number of products on that platform both from Apple, and from third party developers, that are doing on-device and privacy-focused implementations of AI applications.
- oulipo 9y agoAt Snips we are serious about privacy and happy to see so many people taking it as seriously as us!
- natch 9y agoI'm sure Apple is happy to see you join their long existing efforts to support user privacy.
- CaptSpify 9y agoWithout source code that seems like all smoke and mirrors to me. I'd love it if they released it, and I'd start buying their stuff immediately. But until they put their money where there mouth is... meh
- problems 9y agoThank you! You made the first voice assistant platform I'll actually give a serious shot to. I hope your attitude towards user privacy catches on with your competition.
- Eridrus 9y agoSo, why does your marketing material compare api.ai trained on 70 examples to Snips trained on 2000 examples?
- oulipo 9y agoHi! We are comparing what you get by using an alternative service like api.ai (which you need to start by feeding manually) with what you can do with our solution. Manually feeding 70 queries per intent already takes a good deal of energy and imagination, so we thought it was representative of a good effort from a user. This is why Snips proposes to its users to automatically to use generative methods to create high-quality datasets (over 2000 queries per intent). All hypotheses are clarified in our blog post on performances which I encourage you to read! https://medium.com/@alicecoucke/benchmarking-natural-language-understanding-systems-google-facebook-microsoft-and-snips-2b8ddcf9fb19 https://medium.com/@alicecoucke/benchmarking-natural-languag... We even post all the underlying data and results on GitHub so people will be able to verify our claims: https://github.com/snipsco/nlu-benchmark/tree/master/2017-06-custom-intent-engines https://github.com/snipsco/nlu-benchmark/tree/master/2017-06...
- Eridrus 9y ago> Manually feeding 70 queries per intent already takes a good deal of energy and imagination Only if you have to manually make them up. If you have access to the query stream (which I imagine api.ai etc give you since they're online platforms), it's quite quick and easy. I can definitely appreciate integrating things together to make things easy, but this is a pretty biased comparison IMO. It's great that you've made the data available, but the headline metric that most people will see seems misleading.
- oulipo 9y agoAPI.ai and companies which keep user data on their servers are putting user privacy at a risk, and they don't really match the performance we can have when we do datascience carefully
- 9y ago
- roel_v 9y agoDo you do any pre-processing on the audio input to filter out background noise? I notice that in the demo video, you're in a quiet room. I can run PocketSphinx on Raspberry Pi fine, and the recognition is fine too - as long as there isn't too much background noise. When I say 'computer open curtains', for example, it open my curtains through my HA system; but the motors in the curtains make some noise, so I can't say 'stop' halfway through because it just won't pick it up. Another part of the problem is that audio chunks are fed to PocketSphinx by recognizing end of sentence through silence in the input; so when the curtains are still going, it doesn't recognize that the command has stopped and the audio should be passed into PocketSphinx. So, how does Snips deal with this?
- oulipo 9y agoWe use state-of-the-art deep-learning models that are very robust to noise (much more robust than what you get with GMM using Sphinx) and we train the model on data containing noise. This should be paired with a good microphone using microarray to locate the speech very precisely! Our hotword solution is also robust to noise and could be used to detect a word over noise
- roel_v 9y agoGreat, looking forward to trying this.
- jd20 9y agoAre there any off-the-shelf array microphones you recommend, for pairing with Snips on the Pi?
- mfester 9y agoWe've been experimenting with three setups so far: the Matrix Creator, the ReSpeaker and the Conexant. We will soon publish an in-depth benchmark, as well as (highly needed!) tutorials on how to set them up so that they work optimally as audio capture devices on Raspberry.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoAre you going to be releasing a Snips app for mobile, or are you planning on leaving this up to enterprise groups to develop themselves independently? Also do you have any hardware vendors on board who want to include Snips natively?
- oulipo 9y agoThanks! We will release a mobile companion app that people can use to connect to their devices and we are working with partners to embed our platform on native boards! Subscribe to our newsletter on https://snips.ai https://snips.ai to stay tuned and see our blog for more datascience and DIY content!
- azinman2 9y agoAre you going to generalize your hotword detection like snowball? Or allow me to mix and match... e.g. use snowball to wake up then use you for voice recognition / intent matching? One of the reasons I want to build my own is fix issues I see in all the commercial ones, namely the lack of conversation back and forth & being so fixed to a single wake word. For example, when my timer is firing, I don't want to say 'alexa, turn off the timer.' I just want to say 'ok', 'stop', 'cancel timer,' etc.
- oulipo 9y agoWe will add a way for users to record hotwords with their own voice and learn a detector on-device. You can subscribe to our newsletter to be informed when new features will come!
- paul7986 9y agoIs there a api for web?
- tezza 9y ago1) how many hotwords can you have ? my application would need only around 20 distinct words 2) can they be non dictionary hotwords ? say "fruznumble" ? 3) how do headset mics work. a lot of the hotness is mic arrays for roomscale commands, but how does it work with older style mics ?
- oulipo 9y agoFor now there is a hotword shipped in the platform, but if you are an entreprise customer we can train a hotword for you. The hotword detector uses deep-learning and requires quite a bit of data to be robust to noise and to various accents. We are working on a version which would allow more people to build hotword robustly and fast
- oulipo 9y agoWe will be pushing an update of the platform on Friday which solves a small bug where the ASR is taking a bit of time to start listening after the hotword is detected The next version is smooth!
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