8 ms·

Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

147 points by trowngon 6y ago

_underfl0w_ 6y ago
Yikes. All this because they refuse to trim the fat at the C-level. A company can't be profitable by only employing overhead. They'll all be forced to take the ultimate pay cut when Mozilla closes up shop.
ianlevesque 6y ago
Between this and Servo I guess Mozilla is just giving up on relevance. That really sucks.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  That’s what got them in this mess in the first place, fifty pie in the sky projects to be relevant instead of focusing on Firefox or just saving revenue aggressively.
jarym 6y ago
Maybe we should try to find a list of exactly what they are focussing on going forward instead of the slow drip of things they’re cutting back on (servo, MDN, DeepSpeech...) It’s a sad sad day when you have an organisation getting hundreds of millions in funding and turning away from what’s its good at. The decline has begun in my eyes, it may not become apparent for a few years yet.
- ldayley 6y ago
  Is now a good time for someone to write the "Unbundling Mozilla" start-up post on substack? I'd love to see something cogent written up about it. Something like this[0]? [0] - https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-reddit https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-... EDIT: Add link
- mrweasel 6y ago
  Cutting out DeepSpeech seems sensible to me, it’s out of place in the general portfolio of products. It would be nice if Mozilla could tell us what their focus is going to be, but I doubt that Mozilla management know at this point. At this point I’m somewhat concerned that Firefox will be irrelevant in fives years, and I don’t currently feel that Mozilla is communicating clearly that they still care about Firefox. I assume they must, but it would be comforting to know that Firefox is still at the core of Mozillas strategy.
  - Cybiote 6y ago
    > Cutting out DeepSpeech seems sensible to me, it’s out of place in the general portfolio of products. I disagree precisely because of the point you make later: "I’m somewhat concerned that Firefox will be irrelevant in fives years". Functionality provided by deep learning is going to be an important component of many types of software interactions going forward. The logistics of this will be quite different from what we are used to in open source, with the need to fund and coordinate compute, collect and handle data being a more vital aspect compared to the past. There are STT software, some mentioned in this thread, that match or are even better than DeepSpeech but none of them are as ergonomic. Accounting for the value of time, this means it will be more cost effective to outsource such capabilities to the cloud. Which comes with trade-offs that are difficult to appreciate in the short term: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24236489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24236489 I'd say DeepSpeech fits in the mold of Mozilla as a company providing solutions to complicated software problems that are better at respecting the user and their privacy. In the old days, the most accurate TTS and STT models were built into the OS. These days, you need to call into the cloud to get the best stuff. In [1], Internet Archive complains about the quality of their OCR software. It's not that OCR is so bad, it's that the best OCR is found on Google's and Microsoft's computers. It's possible to cobble something together using open source solutions like EasyOCR, Tesseract+OpenCV but that will only get you part of the way there. What makes the cloud offerings so good is they have enough resources to devote to pre-processing pipelines and architecture tweaks and settings better able to handle edge cases. Most of the mass resides in edge cases. From my vantage, the future looks to be one of software as thin layers built atop APIs which call into programs running on the servers of a handful of companies. You might not think this a big deal but these software will be the ones scanning the environment, writing the emails, completing the thoughts and planning the calendars for the majority of humans. [1] https://blog.archive.org/2020/08/21/can-you-help-us-make-the-19th-century-searchable/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/08/21/can-you-help-us-make-the...
awalton 6y ago
Ugh this is a deep gut punch, as this is one of the most interesting recent projects Mozilla was working on in my opinion.
bananaface 6y ago
Are they still collecting data for Common Voice, or is it both projects that they're terminating?
- nshm 6y ago
  CV is also in some not quite clear state https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/mozilla-org-wide-updates-impacts-on-common-voice/65612 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/mozilla-org-wide-updates-imp...
neolog 6y ago
Where does it say DeepSpeech is on hold? I don't see that anywhere.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  > Until a proper decision is being made regarding the future of the project, we will “keep the lights on” and try to address existing issues and review your contributions to the best accommodation we can in the scope of our new roles. You could say that "keep the lights on" is the same as on hold.
- dang 6y ago
  Submitted title was "Mozilla to put DeepSpeech project on hold". We've replaced that with the article title per this guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    I guess that explains why I was under the impression the project was being shuttered after reading the comments, but not the actual post yet. The actual forum post just says they don't know anything about the future of DeepSpeech yet, for those doing the same.
no_wizard 6y ago
I don’t know what is going to save Mozilla, really I don’t. I just wish there was a way to “reach” them and discuss how we the internet community could come to an agreement about what they could do to derive value we would pay for. It’s not for a lack of trying on their part for sure, but it feels like just using their browser isn’t all there is to it any more
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  What would you personally pay Mozilla for?
  - echelon 6y ago
    Firefox, Rust, and privacy. It'd be really awesome if they could develop a search engine or phone (I know they tried) that had an open standards / web-compatible development kit. I want an anti-Google / anti-Apple. Something we own and can extend. Something that doesn't sell our data. I'd also like to see Mozilla doing lobbying. Partnering with the EFF. We've strayed so far from the bright and open Internet of the 90's and 00's. It's depressing to think about how locked up and proprietary it's all become. I'll buy Mozilla / Firefox merch. I'll pay a subscription. edit: Talk to Shuttleworth. Fold Ubuntu in. I'll buy a Mozilla phone and a Mozilla laptop.
    - feanaro 6y ago
      I feel bad for doing a "me too" comment, but you've nailed exactly my thoughts on the subject. I feel like Mozilla hasn't really tried something like this. Every time it gets suggested, it quickly gets shot down (by other internet commenters) as "can't be done" and "wouldn't generate nearly enough money". Well... maybe not with that CEO salary.
      - echelon 6y ago
        Mozilla can model itself after Microsoft somewhat. Provide a development stack (they're experts at Web and Rust). Make themselves the go-to shop for developers in that realm. Sell them on an OS and editor with support. Partner with Ubuntu. Hell, I would even reach out to Nadella and see if they'd be willing to work with Mozilla on hedging against Google. Mac is becoming locked down and kind of unpleasant to develop on/for. Mozilla could win this. Block all the advertising and tracking. Build a Spotify-like news aggregation service you can access from your Mozilla subscription. Build an email service like Hey and a file backup service like Dropbox. It's too bad Zoom bought Keybase, but perhaps Chris Coyne wants a new gig? We should team up to beat FAAMG. Most of the FAAMG actors are actually quite damaging to open source despite benefiting from it greatly.
eruleman 6y ago
Does anyone know of other open-source projects in the speech-to-text space? DeepSpeech was one of the most promising projects, especially the latest versions...
- nshm 6y ago
  Try https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api. It supports 10 languages, works on Android and RPi and also has big and more accurate server models. Other good ones are https://github.com/daanzu/kaldi-active-grammar https://github.com/daanzu/kaldi-active-grammar and https://talonvoice.com/ https://talonvoice.com/ There are toolkits for research like https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi, https://github.com/espnet/espnet https://github.com/espnet/espnet, wav2letter, Espresso, Nvidia/Nemo, https://github.com/didi/athena https://github.com/didi/athena. You can try them too if you want to go deep. Some of them have interesting capabilities.
  - posguy 6y ago
    Comparing DeepSpeech v0.7.4 to Vosk using plain spoken English samples from male and female speakers, they seem to be performing the same if I use vosk-model-small-en-us-0.3 and the full size DeepSpeech model. When I use vosk-model-en-us-daanzu-20200328 the result is perfect on many of these tests, though it does not do punctuation or capitalization outside apostrophes. IIRC there is another project on Github that can add basic formatting though. I am quite surprised with vosk's performance, it even handles odd words like Puget Sound well! Need to test our more accented audio on it, but this is quite exciting.
- albertzeyer 6y ago
  There are a lot of open source projects in this space. DeepSpeech is actually one of the outsiders (they are not represented well in the academic community), and also not quite competitive to other software (at least last time I checked). E.g. some very active projects are: * Kaldi (https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi/ https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi/) obviously, probably the most famous one, and most mature one. For standard hybrid NN-HMM models and also all their more recent lattice-free MMI (LF-MMI) models / training procedure. This is also heavily used in industry (not just research). * ESPnet (https://github.com/espnet/espnet https://github.com/espnet/espnet), for all kind of end-to-end models, like CTC, attention-based encoder-decoder (including Transformer), and transducer models. * Espresso (https://github.com/freewym/espresso https://github.com/freewym/espresso). * Google Lingvo (https://github.com/tensorflow/lingvo https://github.com/tensorflow/lingvo). This is the open source release of Googles internal ASR system, and used by Google in production (their internal version of it, which is not too much different). * NVIDIA OpenSeq2Seq (https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq). * Facebook Fairseq (https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq). Attention-based encoder-decoder models mostly. * Facebook wav2letter (https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter). ASG model/training. * (RETURNN (https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn) and RASR (https://github.com/rwth-i6/rasr https://github.com/rwth-i6/rasr), our own, although this is currently free for academic use only. It is used in production as well. Supports hybrid NN-HMM, CTC, end-to-end attention-based encoder-decoder, transducer, etc.) And there are much more. You will also find lots of ready-to-use trained models.
milofeynman 6y ago
I was hoping DeepSpeech would lead to in home cloud-less "Alexas". Just ask me for a subscription on it and productize it please.
- nshm 6y ago
  There are many cloud-less Alexas already, a good one is rhasspy https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, it is not based on deepspeech though.
  - nmstoker 6y ago
    In the repo/docs, it suggests that DeepSpeech is an option for some languages (English & German). Haven't tried it, but with recent(ish) performance improvements in DS it can run on somewhat less powerful computers than used to be the case. Other options for similar assistants that can also use DS are Mycroft (https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft-ai/customizations/stt-engine https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft-ai/customiz...) and DragonFire (https://github.com/DragonComputer/Dragonfire https://github.com/DragonComputer/Dragonfire)
- ahP7Deew 6y ago
  So to confirm what you have in mind: That's a physical device with all computation and information local? And you'd pay for an upfront cost of the device as well as a subscription? What comes with the subscription? Updated data, new features? Just keeping the lights on?
taf2 6y ago
I see a lot of what appears to be over reaction... doesn’t sound like deepspeech is ending in the first part of the announcement “ Most of the technical changes were already landed, and we see no reason not to ship it. We’ll be releasing 1.0 soon and encourage everyone to update their applications” So looks like at least 1.0 is near and still gonna happen... I know these seem like dark times for Mozilla but I believe they will survive. As I recall the decline of Netscape was a pretty dark time and out of that came Phoenix - er Firefox and here we are today... I’m sure Mozilla and many of the great projects will survive
markthethomas 6y ago
DS is by far the easiest to use/most promising ASR library/kit/thing I’ve used; really hoping it keeps going
badrabbit 6y ago
Are there other foundations like mozilla we can donate to? For initiatives that are in the interest of the public? The Apache foundation is all I can think of but they focus on corporate use projects.
echelon 6y ago
I'm not sure about Mozilla's efforts in STT, but they were lagging pretty far in TTS. [1] Google/Baidu, universities, and an assortment of Chinese/Japanese/Korean social media companies (Line, etc.) are posting the most compelling TTS research, models, and code. Mozilla's TTS system [2] is an amalgam of some of these models, but it lags pretty far behind state of the art. Mozilla should focus on getting additional revenue streams. We can help them out by trying to get Congress / DOJ to strip Google of its ability to have and maintain a browser with which they entrench their search and advertising moat. I think they're clearly in antitrust/anticompetitive territory. [1] I'm pretty familiar with this field as I wrote https://vo.codes https://vo.codes and https://trumped.com https://trumped.com TTS systems. Neither of those are state of the art in terms of mean opinion score (MOS), but they're incredibly efficient. [2] https://github.com/mozilla/TTS https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
- nshm 6y ago
  It is explainable given that there was a single developer working on TTS. It is hard to compete with big academic teams/industry players this way. I also believe Mozilla team was restricted by a lack of computing resources. They had just a single 8GPU server or so.
  - posguy 6y ago
    Said 8 GPU server was consistently in use for Mozilla DeepSpeech (now renamed Mozilla STT) in training models. Its impressive how far Mozilla got considering how limited their resources were.
  - qchris 6y ago
    This is an area that I find unbelievably frustrating. A lack of computing resources in the current day is kind of insane. You can buy an 8GB GPU for <$1000. Even with the rest of the costs, the cost of hardware like this is a drop in the bucket when your main office is housed in Mountain View! Especially on a project that ends up being public-facing, these are missed opportunities where a little can go a long way.
    - 6y ago
Causality1 6y ago
Really a shame. I find so many of Google's STT quirks infuriating enough I'd love a robust alternative.
jonny383 6y ago
Mozilla let politics take over its corporation to the point where it's basically a far left extremist group now that's relying on semi-bribe funding from Google. There's no technology left anymore.
utunga 6y ago
I work with Mozilla's DeepSpeech every day. Mozilla's STT is critical to the survival of important indigenous languages throughout the world. I sincerely hope we can help make this project continue and that Mozilla can help us do that. Ensuring indigenous languages have digital representation is essential to their survival. Speech recognition and synthesis are a vital part of that. Indigenous communities are often ignored by Big Tech because they bring little financial value to their bottom lines, but financial bottom lines are not everything. Culture is more important. Open source tools like DeepSpeech allow communities to build the tools they need for themselves. Māori have been working to help build tools for te reo Māori, and our project is at the forefront of using open source tools like DeepSpeech to revitalize the Māori language. The core of a good speech recognition system helps us in many practical ways, such as improved transcription, support for pronunciation, correct announcements in public transport, correct information on maps and in many other ways. We may well continue to support and use DeepSpeech if the project can continue. But there are also many other projects in other countries in the world who may follow on - such as the Kabyle people of Algeria who are using DeepSpeech, or the Mohawk nation in North America who have been looking into it. By the way we are working on our web presence but for now this quick one pager gives some idea of the work we are doing - https://papareo.nz https://papareo.nz.
- nshm 6y ago
  Is your current data public? Do you have sufficient amount of untranscribed data (1000+ hours)? We could help you.

147 points by trowngon 6y ago

Yikes. All this because they refuse to trim the fat at the C-level. A company can't be profitable by only employing overhead. They'll all be forced to take the ultimate pay cut when Mozilla closes up shop.

ianlevesque 6y ago

Between this and Servo I guess Mozilla is just giving up on relevance. That really sucks.

marcinzm 6y ago
That’s what got them in this mess in the first place, fifty pie in the sky projects to be relevant instead of focusing on Firefox or just saving revenue aggressively.

jarym 6y ago

Maybe we should try to find a list of exactly what they are focussing on going forward instead of the slow drip of things they’re cutting back on (servo, MDN, DeepSpeech...) It’s a sad sad day when you have an organisation getting hundreds of millions in funding and turning away from what’s its good at. The decline has begun in my eyes, it may not become apparent for a few years yet.

ldayley 6y ago
Is now a good time for someone to write the "Unbundling Mozilla" start-up post on substack? I'd love to see something cogent written up about it. Something like this[0]? [0] - https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-reddit https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-... EDIT: Add link
mrweasel 6y ago
Cutting out DeepSpeech seems sensible to me, it’s out of place in the general portfolio of products. It would be nice if Mozilla could tell us what their focus is going to be, but I doubt that Mozilla management know at this point. At this point I’m somewhat concerned that Firefox will be irrelevant in fives years, and I don’t currently feel that Mozilla is communicating clearly that they still care about Firefox. I assume they must, but it would be comforting to know that Firefox is still at the core of Mozillas strategy.
- Cybiote 6y ago
  > Cutting out DeepSpeech seems sensible to me, it’s out of place in the general portfolio of products. I disagree precisely because of the point you make later: "I’m somewhat concerned that Firefox will be irrelevant in fives years". Functionality provided by deep learning is going to be an important component of many types of software interactions going forward. The logistics of this will be quite different from what we are used to in open source, with the need to fund and coordinate compute, collect and handle data being a more vital aspect compared to the past. There are STT software, some mentioned in this thread, that match or are even better than DeepSpeech but none of them are as ergonomic. Accounting for the value of time, this means it will be more cost effective to outsource such capabilities to the cloud. Which comes with trade-offs that are difficult to appreciate in the short term: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24236489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24236489 I'd say DeepSpeech fits in the mold of Mozilla as a company providing solutions to complicated software problems that are better at respecting the user and their privacy. In the old days, the most accurate TTS and STT models were built into the OS. These days, you need to call into the cloud to get the best stuff. In [1], Internet Archive complains about the quality of their OCR software. It's not that OCR is so bad, it's that the best OCR is found on Google's and Microsoft's computers. It's possible to cobble something together using open source solutions like EasyOCR, Tesseract+OpenCV but that will only get you part of the way there. What makes the cloud offerings so good is they have enough resources to devote to pre-processing pipelines and architecture tweaks and settings better able to handle edge cases. Most of the mass resides in edge cases. From my vantage, the future looks to be one of software as thin layers built atop APIs which call into programs running on the servers of a handful of companies. You might not think this a big deal but these software will be the ones scanning the environment, writing the emails, completing the thoughts and planning the calendars for the majority of humans. [1] https://blog.archive.org/2020/08/21/can-you-help-us-make-the-19th-century-searchable/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/08/21/can-you-help-us-make-the...

awalton 6y ago

Ugh this is a deep gut punch, as this is one of the most interesting recent projects Mozilla was working on in my opinion.

bananaface 6y ago

Are they still collecting data for Common Voice, or is it both projects that they're terminating?

nshm 6y ago
CV is also in some not quite clear state https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/mozilla-org-wide-updates-impacts-on-common-voice/65612 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/mozilla-org-wide-updates-imp...

neolog 6y ago

Where does it say DeepSpeech is on hold? I don't see that anywhere.

Ensorceled 6y ago
> Until a proper decision is being made regarding the future of the project, we will “keep the lights on” and try to address existing issues and review your contributions to the best accommodation we can in the scope of our new roles. You could say that "keep the lights on" is the same as on hold.
dang 6y ago
Submitted title was "Mozilla to put DeepSpeech project on hold". We've replaced that with the article title per this guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Vinnl 6y ago
  I guess that explains why I was under the impression the project was being shuttered after reading the comments, but not the actual post yet. The actual forum post just says they don't know anything about the future of DeepSpeech yet, for those doing the same.

no_wizard 6y ago

I don’t know what is going to save Mozilla, really I don’t. I just wish there was a way to “reach” them and discuss how we the internet community could come to an agreement about what they could do to derive value we would pay for. It’s not for a lack of trying on their part for sure, but it feels like just using their browser isn’t all there is to it any more

floatingatoll 6y ago
What would you personally pay Mozilla for?
- echelon 6y ago
  Firefox, Rust, and privacy. It'd be really awesome if they could develop a search engine or phone (I know they tried) that had an open standards / web-compatible development kit. I want an anti-Google / anti-Apple. Something we own and can extend. Something that doesn't sell our data. I'd also like to see Mozilla doing lobbying. Partnering with the EFF. We've strayed so far from the bright and open Internet of the 90's and 00's. It's depressing to think about how locked up and proprietary it's all become. I'll buy Mozilla / Firefox merch. I'll pay a subscription. edit: Talk to Shuttleworth. Fold Ubuntu in. I'll buy a Mozilla phone and a Mozilla laptop.
  - feanaro 6y ago
    I feel bad for doing a "me too" comment, but you've nailed exactly my thoughts on the subject. I feel like Mozilla hasn't really tried something like this. Every time it gets suggested, it quickly gets shot down (by other internet commenters) as "can't be done" and "wouldn't generate nearly enough money". Well... maybe not with that CEO salary.
    - echelon 6y ago
      Mozilla can model itself after Microsoft somewhat. Provide a development stack (they're experts at Web and Rust). Make themselves the go-to shop for developers in that realm. Sell them on an OS and editor with support. Partner with Ubuntu. Hell, I would even reach out to Nadella and see if they'd be willing to work with Mozilla on hedging against Google. Mac is becoming locked down and kind of unpleasant to develop on/for. Mozilla could win this. Block all the advertising and tracking. Build a Spotify-like news aggregation service you can access from your Mozilla subscription. Build an email service like Hey and a file backup service like Dropbox. It's too bad Zoom bought Keybase, but perhaps Chris Coyne wants a new gig? We should team up to beat FAAMG. Most of the FAAMG actors are actually quite damaging to open source despite benefiting from it greatly.

eruleman 6y ago

Does anyone know of other open-source projects in the speech-to-text space? DeepSpeech was one of the most promising projects, especially the latest versions...

nshm 6y ago
Try https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api. It supports 10 languages, works on Android and RPi and also has big and more accurate server models. Other good ones are https://github.com/daanzu/kaldi-active-grammar https://github.com/daanzu/kaldi-active-grammar and https://talonvoice.com/ https://talonvoice.com/ There are toolkits for research like https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi, https://github.com/espnet/espnet https://github.com/espnet/espnet, wav2letter, Espresso, Nvidia/Nemo, https://github.com/didi/athena https://github.com/didi/athena. You can try them too if you want to go deep. Some of them have interesting capabilities.
- posguy 6y ago
  Comparing DeepSpeech v0.7.4 to Vosk using plain spoken English samples from male and female speakers, they seem to be performing the same if I use vosk-model-small-en-us-0.3 and the full size DeepSpeech model. When I use vosk-model-en-us-daanzu-20200328 the result is perfect on many of these tests, though it does not do punctuation or capitalization outside apostrophes. IIRC there is another project on Github that can add basic formatting though. I am quite surprised with vosk's performance, it even handles odd words like Puget Sound well! Need to test our more accented audio on it, but this is quite exciting.
albertzeyer 6y ago
There are a lot of open source projects in this space. DeepSpeech is actually one of the outsiders (they are not represented well in the academic community), and also not quite competitive to other software (at least last time I checked). E.g. some very active projects are: * Kaldi (https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi/ https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi/) obviously, probably the most famous one, and most mature one. For standard hybrid NN-HMM models and also all their more recent lattice-free MMI (LF-MMI) models / training procedure. This is also heavily used in industry (not just research). * ESPnet (https://github.com/espnet/espnet https://github.com/espnet/espnet), for all kind of end-to-end models, like CTC, attention-based encoder-decoder (including Transformer), and transducer models. * Espresso (https://github.com/freewym/espresso https://github.com/freewym/espresso). * Google Lingvo (https://github.com/tensorflow/lingvo https://github.com/tensorflow/lingvo). This is the open source release of Googles internal ASR system, and used by Google in production (their internal version of it, which is not too much different). * NVIDIA OpenSeq2Seq (https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq). * Facebook Fairseq (https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq). Attention-based encoder-decoder models mostly. * Facebook wav2letter (https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter). ASG model/training. * (RETURNN (https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn) and RASR (https://github.com/rwth-i6/rasr https://github.com/rwth-i6/rasr), our own, although this is currently free for academic use only. It is used in production as well. Supports hybrid NN-HMM, CTC, end-to-end attention-based encoder-decoder, transducer, etc.) And there are much more. You will also find lots of ready-to-use trained models.

milofeynman 6y ago

I was hoping DeepSpeech would lead to in home cloud-less "Alexas". Just ask me for a subscription on it and productize it please.

nshm 6y ago
There are many cloud-less Alexas already, a good one is rhasspy https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, it is not based on deepspeech though.
- nmstoker 6y ago
  In the repo/docs, it suggests that DeepSpeech is an option for some languages (English & German). Haven't tried it, but with recent(ish) performance improvements in DS it can run on somewhat less powerful computers than used to be the case. Other options for similar assistants that can also use DS are Mycroft (https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft-ai/customizations/stt-engine https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft-ai/customiz...) and DragonFire (https://github.com/DragonComputer/Dragonfire https://github.com/DragonComputer/Dragonfire)
ahP7Deew 6y ago
So to confirm what you have in mind: That's a physical device with all computation and information local? And you'd pay for an upfront cost of the device as well as a subscription? What comes with the subscription? Updated data, new features? Just keeping the lights on?

taf2 6y ago

I see a lot of what appears to be over reaction... doesn’t sound like deepspeech is ending in the first part of the announcement “ Most of the technical changes were already landed, and we see no reason not to ship it. We’ll be releasing 1.0 soon and encourage everyone to update their applications” So looks like at least 1.0 is near and still gonna happen... I know these seem like dark times for Mozilla but I believe they will survive. As I recall the decline of Netscape was a pretty dark time and out of that came Phoenix - er Firefox and here we are today... I’m sure Mozilla and many of the great projects will survive

markthethomas 6y ago

DS is by far the easiest to use/most promising ASR library/kit/thing I’ve used; really hoping it keeps going

badrabbit 6y ago

Are there other foundations like mozilla we can donate to? For initiatives that are in the interest of the public? The Apache foundation is all I can think of but they focus on corporate use projects.

echelon 6y ago

I'm not sure about Mozilla's efforts in STT, but they were lagging pretty far in TTS. [1] Google/Baidu, universities, and an assortment of Chinese/Japanese/Korean social media companies (Line, etc.) are posting the most compelling TTS research, models, and code. Mozilla's TTS system [2] is an amalgam of some of these models, but it lags pretty far behind state of the art. Mozilla should focus on getting additional revenue streams. We can help them out by trying to get Congress / DOJ to strip Google of its ability to have and maintain a browser with which they entrench their search and advertising moat. I think they're clearly in antitrust/anticompetitive territory. [1] I'm pretty familiar with this field as I wrote https://vo.codes https://vo.codes and https://trumped.com https://trumped.com TTS systems. Neither of those are state of the art in terms of mean opinion score (MOS), but they're incredibly efficient. [2] https://github.com/mozilla/TTS https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

nshm 6y ago
It is explainable given that there was a single developer working on TTS. It is hard to compete with big academic teams/industry players this way. I also believe Mozilla team was restricted by a lack of computing resources. They had just a single 8GPU server or so.
- posguy 6y ago
  Said 8 GPU server was consistently in use for Mozilla DeepSpeech (now renamed Mozilla STT) in training models. Its impressive how far Mozilla got considering how limited their resources were.
- qchris 6y ago
  This is an area that I find unbelievably frustrating. A lack of computing resources in the current day is kind of insane. You can buy an 8GB GPU for <$1000. Even with the rest of the costs, the cost of hardware like this is a drop in the bucket when your main office is housed in Mountain View! Especially on a project that ends up being public-facing, these are missed opportunities where a little can go a long way.
  - 6y ago

Causality1 6y ago

Really a shame. I find so many of Google's STT quirks infuriating enough I'd love a robust alternative.

jonny383 6y ago

Mozilla let politics take over its corporation to the point where it's basically a far left extremist group now that's relying on semi-bribe funding from Google. There's no technology left anymore.

utunga 6y ago

I work with Mozilla's DeepSpeech every day. Mozilla's STT is critical to the survival of important indigenous languages throughout the world. I sincerely hope we can help make this project continue and that Mozilla can help us do that. Ensuring indigenous languages have digital representation is essential to their survival. Speech recognition and synthesis are a vital part of that. Indigenous communities are often ignored by Big Tech because they bring little financial value to their bottom lines, but financial bottom lines are not everything. Culture is more important. Open source tools like DeepSpeech allow communities to build the tools they need for themselves. Māori have been working to help build tools for te reo Māori, and our project is at the forefront of using open source tools like DeepSpeech to revitalize the Māori language. The core of a good speech recognition system helps us in many practical ways, such as improved transcription, support for pronunciation, correct announcements in public transport, correct information on maps and in many other ways. We may well continue to support and use DeepSpeech if the project can continue. But there are also many other projects in other countries in the world who may follow on - such as the Kabyle people of Algeria who are using DeepSpeech, or the Mohawk nation in North America who have been looking into it. By the way we are working on our web presence but for now this quick one pager gives some idea of the work we are doing - https://papareo.nz https://papareo.nz.

nshm 6y ago
Is your current data public? Do you have sufficient amount of untranscribed data (1000+ hours)? We could help you.