> Saw a system at Makerfaire that does voice recognition without the cloud (MOVI) and I keep thinking having non-privacy-invading computers you could talk to wo

> Saw a system at Makerfaire that does voice recognition without the cloud (MOVI) and I keep thinking having non-privacy-invading computers you could talk to would be a useful thing. Perhaps ARM will make that possible. Yes, powerful ARM embedded platforms are making this more and more possible and I'm at least excited about it. Not only that, speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies are getting more efficient by the month. There was a paper just this past week (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.09263.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.09263.pdf) which demonstrates speech synthesis with an order of magnitude faster performance. Advances like those make it easier to cram these technologies on local IoT platforms. And there's certainly been a number of local focused AI projects over the past few years. I remember Snips.ai being decent for building local-only voice assistants. It worked on a Raspberry Pi, though you still have to hack together decent microphones for it. All of this gives me hope for an open source voice assistant that will be competitive with the commercial options. Now if the makers of smart accessories (lights, etc) would stop being anti-consumer for two minutes we might get decent accessories that don't require a cloud.