8 ms·

As far as I know Mycroft does its speech recognition in the cloud, so your voice has to leave your network unfortunately. This is the reason why I don't have a

by lifty 7y ago

As far as I know Mycroft does its speech recognition in the cloud, so your voice has to leave your network unfortunately. This is the reason why I don't have a voice assistant yet. There was snips.ai which tried to solve this problem locally but they were acquired by Sonos. edit: spelling

antonzabirko 7y ago
Your voice is already compromised if you use a smartphone or windows/Mac with a mic.
- lifty 7y ago
  If you are a target of the NSA or some other state actor, then perhaps. If not, and you take a bit of care to disable the voice assistant on your devices (Siri, Google. etc), then you should be fine.
  - Rooster61 7y ago
    That just disables the voice assistant. It does nothing to ensure that your mic isn't on, listening, and recording at any time. I've had too many targeted ads start popping up after conversations with people to be convinced otherwise.
    - arbitrage 7y ago
      it's observer bias, nothing more. test it out. pick a phrase, my spouse and i chose "snowmobile". For the next week, we had random conversations about how cool snowmobiles are, how badly we wanted one, what price we were willing to pay, financing, etc. we peppered our conversations with click bait, honestly. neither of us particularly ever had any interest whatsoever in snowmobiles, so we figured this would be a pretty ok test for anecdata. at the end of the week, we both saw no increase or even a mention in our targeted adverts regarding snowmobiles. likely what is happening is that you searched something somewhere on your phone, then brought it up in conversation, then saw an increase in ads related to that subject.
      - iamricks 7y ago
        I think people just underestimate how good targeted ads are. They're probably predicting something we might want before we even realize we want it.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        Do you live somewhere snowmobile advertisers are likely to target?
        bluGill 7y ago
        Even if he doesn't there are snowmobile resorts. People pay good money to go to places with a lot of snow, rent a snowmobile and ride in the wilderness for a week. Also a fair number of people live where a snowmobile isn't practical but have a cabin where they are and so they will be making weekend trips to where they are practical. Your point stands though, anyone who lives in the wrong area is unlikely to be targeted if the only indication they might want a snowmobile is home conversion. If you are serious you will do other searches (tracked for sure), and have location history in a target area (might not be track able, these area often have poor cell coverage)
      - Rooster61 7y ago
        > At the end of the week, we both saw no increase or even a mention in our targeted adverts regarding snowmobiles. While I do respect you and your spouse for trying this experiment, it's entirely too small a sample size to really prove that this doesn't happen. There are a ton of variables involved, the biggest being which advertisers may or may not be listening in at any given time. It's hardly a controlled experiment, and I can't say I can put any stock in it. It also does not prove that it is observer bias. I have had things pop up that I am %100 absolutely positive I never in any way shape or form looked into, yet there the ads were after a short conversations with others who did have an interest.
        mrobot 7y ago
        One thing i thought of and wanted to test: what if you yourself don't do any internet queries but someone on the same network as you does? I've had conversations with people, one time we were talking about a concert venue which i did not look up, but i did start to receive ads for that concert venue. It creeped me out initially, but I believe the other person on the same home network was googling or looking for information on that venue on their phone. I believe we were just associated together for advertisement purposes.
    - slipheen 7y ago
      Your defeatism is making things worse not better. Your message is basically "You're already screwed, why bother trying?" Why act that way? Who are you helping? If you support privacy, then people taking steps to try to share less data ought to be encouraged, right? Maybe it's not perfect - But it's worth trying to do better.
      - Rooster61 7y ago
        In what way did my message suggest defeatism? I take active steps to minimize when and how the microphones around me listen in. In no way do I subscribe to the idea that "we are already screwed". Please do not take the worst possible interpretation of what people say on HN. It's in the guidelines and generally looked down upon. This is not reddit.
        pkalinowski 7y ago
        Android doesn't listen. You can check by yourself using adb logcat
      - antonzabirko 7y ago
        No, stop wasting your energy on change you won't make happen. Imagine if every innovator spent their time appealing to others.
    - Jarwain 7y ago
      My pet theory is that this is actually a geo-location type of tracking, combined with the recency illusion. Let's say person A was doing research on a product they're interested in buying. That product category is now associated with person A. Person A goes and visits person B. Because our phones track where we go by default for most people, now there's an association between Person A and Person B, and a potential likelihood that person B is also interested in that product. Thus the occasional ad shows up for the product Person A was researching. Since Person A and Person B are friends, it's possible Person A will talk about the product they're interested in. Person B now notices that they're getting ads for the product that Person A talked about.
  - antonzabirko 7y ago
    It's not the NSA that does it, it's Microsoft, apple, Huawei, and so on. And no, disabling the voice apps does not out you out of telemetry.
    - mthoms 7y ago
      Do you have any citation/proof? Or is this just a suspicion?
- _def 7y ago
  Good thing it runs on a RPi then.
- lukifer 7y ago
  One theory of security is that you can't ever be truly secure; but you can make it difficult/expensive for your security to be violated. If you lock the door, someone can always break a window, but that creates more noise and therefore more risk, making an intruder more likely to seek a softer target. A ten-foot wall can be breached, but it will likely dissuade anyone without an eleven-foot ladder. The problem with mass surveillance is not that the NSA/etc can breach anyone they want; that's effectively always been true. It's that it's cheap to breach everyone, by default, all the time. Taking reasonable precautions such that you can't have your data swept up cheaply, instead requiring targeted human effort and/or a court order, does create a deterrent, and helps counteract the current imbalance of power between TLAs and We The People.
tekchip 7y ago
The default configuration is cloud based. However you do get to choose where your voice data goes. They also have a method to keep the TTS local and I haven't checked in on the project in a while but they were either working on or already had a local home server so you can make the whole system internal if you wish. I'd provide reference links but as noted site is down currently. Edit: There are also several skills available that can point at full, local, downloads of wikipedia and the like. So if you prefer faster results and keeping some of your queries internal as a sort of hybrid thing that's an option as well.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Snips were acquired? That's bad news, they were the only ones doing offline voice recognition...
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    They were definitely not the only ones, just the ones with the most aggressively spammy marketing team. HN mods actually stepped in once or twice about it. Rhasspy is a really cool project that is compatible with a bunch of fully offline speech frameworks. PicoVoice is a super neat company too.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      Oh, thanks for that, I've been looking for a good offline speech framework. Unfortunately, the hardest part for me is the microphone array, hopefully I can find something good there.
      - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
        I haven't had time to play with Rhasspy, but the fact that you can plug and play components from different speech platforms is really promising, particularly when I want to interface it with my own assistant at some point. Wake word detection, speech to text, intent recognition, etc. is all split out and able to be plugged into separately.
hipitihop 7y ago
The pieces of Snips that were OSS before Sonos bought and ditched the community are being leveraged along with new work in Project Alice https://github.com/project-Alice-assistant https://github.com/project-Alice-assistant It continues to strive to be modular and offline. By design, the choice of online/offline elements including Google ASR and Amazon TTS along with corresponding quality and privacy tradeoffs is your choice. Come give a hand.
- tetris11 7y ago
  This is really nice, are there any plans for Android deployment?
  - lavi_luffy 7y ago
    ni
- intopieces 7y ago
  Pretty cool but weird choice of logo... are they run by The Umbrella Corporation?
  - deadbunny 7y ago
    Probably referencing Program Alice from the films.
  - raghava 7y ago
    https://github.com/project-alice-assistant/ProjectAlice#project-alice-as-in-resident-evil-isnt-that-scary https://github.com/project-alice-assistant/ProjectAlice#proj...
specialist 7y ago
"As far as I know Mycroft does its speech recognition in the cloud..." How practical would it be to recognize my most common commands, eg "resume podcast", offline?
- necovek 7y ago
  The fact that they are online is stopping a bunch of people from shouting at nobody in particular to "dim the lights", "play this (local) playlist", "turn ac on", "play two random episodes of paw patrol"... Eg. me. Many of those who are concerned with apps phoning home would be the ones to keep their data and media locally too!
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  Very practical, there are even dictation apps with quite good accuracy (and that is dictation, which is much harder because the sentences are free-form, not predefined) which work offline (like some offline Nuance Dragon apps).
tobylane 7y ago
Last time this came up the options were the Mozilla TTS service or do it locally with tensorflow lite and DeepSpeech.
sebow 7y ago
I'm pretty sure there are self-hosted alternatives. First one i recently tried that comes to mind is almond. Yes it's a struggle but you can definitely fiddle with them to retain your privacy.
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
This is a major drawback of mycroft and I really hope they fix it soon.
lukifer 7y ago
I've been having great success building homebrew voice assistants with Rhasspy [0] and voice2json [1] (they're sister projects from the same maintainer). The code's not ready to share yet, but I have a voice-controlled Raspberry Pi music server in my car now, working 100% offline (got it ready just in time to never have to drive anywhere, lol). [0] https://github.com/synesthesiam/rhasspy https://github.com/synesthesiam/rhasspy [1] http://voice2json.org/ http://voice2json.org/
- nabeards 7y ago
  Please share! The community can help with ‘readiness’ (:
  - lukifer 7y ago
    Haha, it's a completely garbage hodge-podge of Node and Bash right now, but I'm cleaning it up and will be sharing soon!
CodeMage 7y ago
I found about Mycroft through their Kickstarter project, Mycroft Mark II. What convinced me to back them was that they said that, theoretically, I should be able to self-host their server on my own hardware at home. Unfortunately, they mismanaged Mark II so badly that I lost all faith in Mycroft in general.
- catacombs 7y ago
  Same. I, too, saw the Indiegogo campaign and gladly handed over nearly $200 for the Mycroft Mark II. Two and half years later, there has been little progress, with no telling when they'll actually deliver the device to backers. It's one thing for a company to delay production to have lost money on this with no help from Indiegogo and a refusal from the company to refund backers, I have no hope for this product seeing the light of day any time soon. Shame on Mycroft for this scam.
  - blendergeek 7y ago
    That is the nature of crowdfunding. This is not a scam unless there is deliberate malice involved. A mere inability to deliver a product is not a scam. They cannot give you a refund as the money had been spent on development. If they had held your money so that they could now give you a refund, that would be extremely problematic.
kleiba 7y ago
Well, there is some current research in Europe at least on how to make voice assistant technology more respecting of their user's privacy: https://www.compriseh2020.eu/ https://www.compriseh2020.eu/ It's still far from market-ready, though...
andoriyu 7y ago
Not exactly: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/about-mycroft-ai/faq#can-mycroft-run-completely-offline-can-i-self-host-everything https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/about-mycroft-ai/faq#can-...
adamredwoods 7y ago
I can't wait for a community-driven, open-source data model that we can take offline and plug into any software adapter. With a little version control and some voluntary data samples, a large enough community could get it going.
PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
Disappointing. And there's no Mac or Windows version, so... yawn

by lifty 7y ago

antonzabirko 7y ago

Your voice is already compromised if you use a smartphone or windows/Mac with a mic.

lifty 7y ago
If you are a target of the NSA or some other state actor, then perhaps. If not, and you take a bit of care to disable the voice assistant on your devices (Siri, Google. etc), then you should be fine.
- Rooster61 7y ago
  That just disables the voice assistant. It does nothing to ensure that your mic isn't on, listening, and recording at any time. I've had too many targeted ads start popping up after conversations with people to be convinced otherwise.
  - arbitrage 7y ago
    it's observer bias, nothing more. test it out. pick a phrase, my spouse and i chose "snowmobile". For the next week, we had random conversations about how cool snowmobiles are, how badly we wanted one, what price we were willing to pay, financing, etc. we peppered our conversations with click bait, honestly. neither of us particularly ever had any interest whatsoever in snowmobiles, so we figured this would be a pretty ok test for anecdata. at the end of the week, we both saw no increase or even a mention in our targeted adverts regarding snowmobiles. likely what is happening is that you searched something somewhere on your phone, then brought it up in conversation, then saw an increase in ads related to that subject.
    - iamricks 7y ago
      I think people just underestimate how good targeted ads are. They're probably predicting something we might want before we even realize we want it.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      Do you live somewhere snowmobile advertisers are likely to target?
      - bluGill 7y ago
        Even if he doesn't there are snowmobile resorts. People pay good money to go to places with a lot of snow, rent a snowmobile and ride in the wilderness for a week. Also a fair number of people live where a snowmobile isn't practical but have a cabin where they are and so they will be making weekend trips to where they are practical. Your point stands though, anyone who lives in the wrong area is unlikely to be targeted if the only indication they might want a snowmobile is home conversion. If you are serious you will do other searches (tracked for sure), and have location history in a target area (might not be track able, these area often have poor cell coverage)
    - Rooster61 7y ago
      > At the end of the week, we both saw no increase or even a mention in our targeted adverts regarding snowmobiles. While I do respect you and your spouse for trying this experiment, it's entirely too small a sample size to really prove that this doesn't happen. There are a ton of variables involved, the biggest being which advertisers may or may not be listening in at any given time. It's hardly a controlled experiment, and I can't say I can put any stock in it. It also does not prove that it is observer bias. I have had things pop up that I am %100 absolutely positive I never in any way shape or form looked into, yet there the ads were after a short conversations with others who did have an interest.
      - mrobot 7y ago
        One thing i thought of and wanted to test: what if you yourself don't do any internet queries but someone on the same network as you does? I've had conversations with people, one time we were talking about a concert venue which i did not look up, but i did start to receive ads for that concert venue. It creeped me out initially, but I believe the other person on the same home network was googling or looking for information on that venue on their phone. I believe we were just associated together for advertisement purposes.
  - slipheen 7y ago
    Your defeatism is making things worse not better. Your message is basically "You're already screwed, why bother trying?" Why act that way? Who are you helping? If you support privacy, then people taking steps to try to share less data ought to be encouraged, right? Maybe it's not perfect - But it's worth trying to do better.
    - Rooster61 7y ago
      In what way did my message suggest defeatism? I take active steps to minimize when and how the microphones around me listen in. In no way do I subscribe to the idea that "we are already screwed". Please do not take the worst possible interpretation of what people say on HN. It's in the guidelines and generally looked down upon. This is not reddit.
      - pkalinowski 7y ago
        Android doesn't listen. You can check by yourself using adb logcat
    - antonzabirko 7y ago
      No, stop wasting your energy on change you won't make happen. Imagine if every innovator spent their time appealing to others.
  - Jarwain 7y ago
    My pet theory is that this is actually a geo-location type of tracking, combined with the recency illusion. Let's say person A was doing research on a product they're interested in buying. That product category is now associated with person A. Person A goes and visits person B. Because our phones track where we go by default for most people, now there's an association between Person A and Person B, and a potential likelihood that person B is also interested in that product. Thus the occasional ad shows up for the product Person A was researching. Since Person A and Person B are friends, it's possible Person A will talk about the product they're interested in. Person B now notices that they're getting ads for the product that Person A talked about.
- antonzabirko 7y ago
  It's not the NSA that does it, it's Microsoft, apple, Huawei, and so on. And no, disabling the voice apps does not out you out of telemetry.
  - mthoms 7y ago
    Do you have any citation/proof? Or is this just a suspicion?
_def 7y ago
Good thing it runs on a RPi then.
lukifer 7y ago
One theory of security is that you can't ever be truly secure; but you can make it difficult/expensive for your security to be violated. If you lock the door, someone can always break a window, but that creates more noise and therefore more risk, making an intruder more likely to seek a softer target. A ten-foot wall can be breached, but it will likely dissuade anyone without an eleven-foot ladder. The problem with mass surveillance is not that the NSA/etc can breach anyone they want; that's effectively always been true. It's that it's cheap to breach everyone, by default, all the time. Taking reasonable precautions such that you can't have your data swept up cheaply, instead requiring targeted human effort and/or a court order, does create a deterrent, and helps counteract the current imbalance of power between TLAs and We The People.

tekchip 7y ago

The default configuration is cloud based. However you do get to choose where your voice data goes. They also have a method to keep the TTS local and I haven't checked in on the project in a while but they were either working on or already had a local home server so you can make the whole system internal if you wish. I'd provide reference links but as noted site is down currently. Edit: There are also several skills available that can point at full, local, downloads of wikipedia and the like. So if you prefer faster results and keeping some of your queries internal as a sort of hybrid thing that's an option as well.

StavrosK 7y ago
Snips were acquired? That's bad news, they were the only ones doing offline voice recognition...
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  They were definitely not the only ones, just the ones with the most aggressively spammy marketing team. HN mods actually stepped in once or twice about it. Rhasspy is a really cool project that is compatible with a bunch of fully offline speech frameworks. PicoVoice is a super neat company too.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Oh, thanks for that, I've been looking for a good offline speech framework. Unfortunately, the hardest part for me is the microphone array, hopefully I can find something good there.
    - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      I haven't had time to play with Rhasspy, but the fact that you can plug and play components from different speech platforms is really promising, particularly when I want to interface it with my own assistant at some point. Wake word detection, speech to text, intent recognition, etc. is all split out and able to be plugged into separately.

hipitihop 7y ago

The pieces of Snips that were OSS before Sonos bought and ditched the community are being leveraged along with new work in Project Alice https://github.com/project-Alice-assistant https://github.com/project-Alice-assistant It continues to strive to be modular and offline. By design, the choice of online/offline elements including Google ASR and Amazon TTS along with corresponding quality and privacy tradeoffs is your choice. Come give a hand.

tetris11 7y ago
This is really nice, are there any plans for Android deployment?
- lavi_luffy 7y ago
  ni
intopieces 7y ago
Pretty cool but weird choice of logo... are they run by The Umbrella Corporation?
- deadbunny 7y ago
  Probably referencing Program Alice from the films.
- raghava 7y ago
  https://github.com/project-alice-assistant/ProjectAlice#project-alice-as-in-resident-evil-isnt-that-scary https://github.com/project-alice-assistant/ProjectAlice#proj...

specialist 7y ago

"As far as I know Mycroft does its speech recognition in the cloud..." How practical would it be to recognize my most common commands, eg "resume podcast", offline?

necovek 7y ago
The fact that they are online is stopping a bunch of people from shouting at nobody in particular to "dim the lights", "play this (local) playlist", "turn ac on", "play two random episodes of paw patrol"... Eg. me. Many of those who are concerned with apps phoning home would be the ones to keep their data and media locally too!
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
Very practical, there are even dictation apps with quite good accuracy (and that is dictation, which is much harder because the sentences are free-form, not predefined) which work offline (like some offline Nuance Dragon apps).

tobylane 7y ago

Last time this came up the options were the Mozilla TTS service or do it locally with tensorflow lite and DeepSpeech.

sebow 7y ago

I'm pretty sure there are self-hosted alternatives. First one i recently tried that comes to mind is almond. Yes it's a struggle but you can definitely fiddle with them to retain your privacy.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago

This is a major drawback of mycroft and I really hope they fix it soon.

lukifer 7y ago

I've been having great success building homebrew voice assistants with Rhasspy [0] and voice2json [1] (they're sister projects from the same maintainer). The code's not ready to share yet, but I have a voice-controlled Raspberry Pi music server in my car now, working 100% offline (got it ready just in time to never have to drive anywhere, lol). [0] https://github.com/synesthesiam/rhasspy https://github.com/synesthesiam/rhasspy [1] http://voice2json.org/ http://voice2json.org/

nabeards 7y ago
Please share! The community can help with ‘readiness’ (:
- lukifer 7y ago
  Haha, it's a completely garbage hodge-podge of Node and Bash right now, but I'm cleaning it up and will be sharing soon!

CodeMage 7y ago

I found about Mycroft through their Kickstarter project, Mycroft Mark II. What convinced me to back them was that they said that, theoretically, I should be able to self-host their server on my own hardware at home. Unfortunately, they mismanaged Mark II so badly that I lost all faith in Mycroft in general.

catacombs 7y ago
Same. I, too, saw the Indiegogo campaign and gladly handed over nearly $200 for the Mycroft Mark II. Two and half years later, there has been little progress, with no telling when they'll actually deliver the device to backers. It's one thing for a company to delay production to have lost money on this with no help from Indiegogo and a refusal from the company to refund backers, I have no hope for this product seeing the light of day any time soon. Shame on Mycroft for this scam.
- blendergeek 7y ago
  That is the nature of crowdfunding. This is not a scam unless there is deliberate malice involved. A mere inability to deliver a product is not a scam. They cannot give you a refund as the money had been spent on development. If they had held your money so that they could now give you a refund, that would be extremely problematic.

kleiba 7y ago

Well, there is some current research in Europe at least on how to make voice assistant technology more respecting of their user's privacy: https://www.compriseh2020.eu/ https://www.compriseh2020.eu/ It's still far from market-ready, though...

andoriyu 7y ago

Not exactly: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/about-mycroft-ai/faq#can-mycroft-run-completely-offline-can-i-self-host-everything https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/about-mycroft-ai/faq#can-...

adamredwoods 7y ago

I can't wait for a community-driven, open-source data model that we can take offline and plug into any software adapter. With a little version control and some voluntary data samples, a large enough community could get it going.

PunksATawnyFill 7y ago

Disappointing. And there's no Mac or Windows version, so... yawn