9 ms·

Project Alice – an open source virtual assistant that can run offline

169 points by jka 4y ago

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Offline is the key here. I wrote a short story not so long ago [1] about the educational potential of near-future world where storage gets so dense and cheap that the tide turns back toward local computing, away from the trend of the past 10 years toward "online cloud". What happens when the corpus of all human knowledge really can sit on your table top as the early sci-fi writers predicted? [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  I don't believe storage is the main limiting factor here - availability is. And whether you want to make your data available outside.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    So imagine an IPv6 based world where every household has rock solid high speed networking capability, and a relatively smart firewall deciding what connections to allow and disallow without heavy handed management work.
- andy_ppp 4y ago
  Really interesting, it makes me think about an AI that understands all the rules of physics and you can ask it questions the way GPT3 does, “design me an f1.4 lens that is low profile and projects light onto a curved 1inch sensor from X feet” or “how do I design a magnetic field to contain plasma at a maximum density with power input below X watts/h”. We really do stand on the edge of a very strange set of possibilities happening…
- jancsika 4y ago
  > What happens when the corpus of all human knowledge really can sit on your table top as the early sci-fi writers predicted? If reality is any indication, then if it's copyrightable it won't be sitting on your table top: * Set of important facts about the world: not copyrightable. Yet so freely accessible I don't even bother to copy Wikipedia to my table top. * Set of important modern books: copyrightable and mostly still under copyright. Also, probably digitized by Google. Not available for table top copying. * Set of important music scores: copyrightable, but most are by dead composers, and most are out of copyright. Hooray! Except the IMLSP had to go offline for almost a year, seek legal help and create a staff-review process for uploads to make absolutely sure no publishers could sue him out of existence. * That full video of Will Forte playing white supremacist "Hamilton Whiteman" at Seth Meyer's actual rehearsal dinner: copyrightable. I actually watched the whole thing at one point, but it apparently got a copyright claim so I can't share it with anyone. I just added this one on the off chance someone on here has a copy and feels daring, because dammit, it was funny, and I want to watch it again. I feel like the tech world needs a decent political mover-and-shaker who could make a Glengarry Glen Ross style speech at this point: something about how with the tools you got available he could go out and make legal table top human knowledge boxes a reality tonight...
  - thesz 4y ago
    Consider Cyc [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc It deduces relations from set of facts in it's database. If you have human knowledge from wikipedia on your desktop, you can deduce your own facts using Cyc's engine or something else. It will be fun to tinker with. You can even start your own conspiracy theory, because you can.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > If reality is any indication, then if it's copyrightable it won't be sitting on your table top: Absolutely spot on. Indeed, the story was an oblique advocacy for SciHub and an argument as to how the digital entertainment industry and publishers may eventually be the greatest obstacle to human progress.
  - mdaniel 4y ago
- astrange 4y ago
  The set of all human knowledge doesn't seem to be accessible anywhere right now; it's not on the open internet at least. Try "how do you make an entire digital camera starting with enough of the right kinds of sand?". Some of this is a trade secret, some of it is in other languages, some of it can't be explained by any person in the production process because you can't describe things you only know through muscle memory.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  The corpus of knowledge is forever growing and it grows faster than many people's internet connection.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    That sounds like a truism, but actually I am not sure it follows. You may be thinking of data, but knowledge is different. Consider the ordering of: Signals (semantic/non-entropy (changes that have meaning)) Data (interpretable signals) Information (data that informs) Useful Information Knowledge (justifiable, true and useful information in context) Wisdom (knowledge applicable to human survival and evolution) Then, given Sturgeons Law that 99% of everything is rubbish at each level then "knowledge" is not growing as fast as you might think (and much human knowledge is lost at a terrible rate). Humans presently generate about 2-5 Exabytes of raw data per year. Only a small fraction of that is information, considerably less is useful information, and some fraction of that - in the form of good quality books, journals, papers etc, encoded without redundancy, is probably in the order of 100s of gigabytes per year. For over 70 years a shelf of encyclopedias was considered approximate summary of essential knowledge. It's not implausible that storage growth could overtake knowledge production at some point in the not to distance future.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      >Then, given Sturgeons Law that 99% of everything is rubbish at each level then "knowledge" is not growing as fast as you might think Sturgeon's law was 90%, also that's a mighty big given to entrust to a snarky Science Fiction writer's quip explaining why so much Science Fiction in his time sucked.
- api 4y ago
  It already can if it’s mostly text. Have you checked hard drive prices lately?
  - _carbyau_ 4y ago
    Not ALL of human knowledge - and many(most?) might cringe to consider it so, but wikipedia english text only was 8GB or so in 2013 when I put it onto an ereader. Was handy to be able to read about the places as I travelled to them without internet connectivity. Might be more now but storage has likely outpaced it in growth.
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >the educational potential of near-future world where storage gets so dense and cheap that the tide turns back toward local computing, away from the trend of the past 10 years toward "online cloud" I'd argue that storage is already dense and cheap enough to "turn the tide back toward local computing." The reasons why the cloud (more precisely: someone else's servers) and all manner of non-local computing and storage became so entrenched was (at least in the US) that ISPs mostly offered (and still do) asymmetric internet links for "consumer" plans, refuse to provide static IP addressess (IPv4 and IPv6) and actively discourage (via port blocking/throttling) running servers on such links. And when download/upload bandwidth ratios (for my links they're 20 and 17) are so skewed towards downloads, hosting content becomes less viable. Add poorly managed physical plant and resistance to spending money on upgrades, and you have unreliable links with inadequate bandwidth. After decades of this, is it any wonder that centralized storage/compute/streaming services found a ready niche, and have exploited the anti-consumer/anti-competitive actions and policies of the big ISPs to the point that many folks don't realize it could be any other way. Want to move back toward local computing? Make decently fast, symmetric internet links the norm. Getting that done (at least in the US) will be a tall order. And even if/when we get there, such a shift won't happen all at once, especially since centralized services will fight tooth and nail to keep their customers (for paid services) and product (for "free" services) at our expense. However, once decently fast symmetric bandwidth is the norm for "consumer" internet links, decentralization will follow. It would likely take a while, especially since many (most?) of the developers of decentralized solutions (I'm looking at you, diaspora, mastodon and matrix, among others) make self-hosting their software inaccessible to non-technical folks[0]. There are many great reasons to move away from centralized compute/storage/streaming services, but there are significant barriers to doing so, at multiple levels of the network infrastructure. And more's the pity. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783477
rimeice 4y ago
Why do virtual assistants seem to always have female names?
- manfre 4y ago
  For this project, the readme has a section about the name. tl;dr it's name is from resident evil.
  - glowingly 4y ago
    In that game/movie world, it is the name of an AI. Maybe some passdown influence from Star Trek's ship computer, which had a female voice?
    - chmod775 4y ago
      > In that game/movie world, it is the name of an AI. Alice is the name of the main character. The supercomputer/AI was called Red Queen. Though it gets a bit muddled, not least because the Red Queen was created using the template of one Alicia Marcus, of whom Alice herself is a clone.
      - Psychokiller 4y ago
        Thank you for the correct analysis of my thoughts at the moment I started Project Alice :-) Often people will think that Alice and the Red Queen is an easy mix and a wrong shortcut to Resident Evil. But indeed, the Red Queen, in the MOVIES, is at the image of Alicia. When RE last part came out, I wanted to include the white queen in Project Alice' mood, but that's not done yet
- astrange 4y ago
  In the 90s they had male(?) names like Clippy, Bonzi Buddy and Microsoft Bob. Now we still have Bixby, which sort-of sounds like an English butler.
  - 4y ago
i_like_waiting 4y ago
I was already thinking about selling my sould (getting internet connected voice assistant). So I am super glad that there is an offline alternative. I didn't even know it is possible, but now I feel kind of obligated to put those $30 I would pay otherwise towards this project instead
- tootie 4y ago
  I finally caved and got an Echo a few months ago. After a few weeks of my kids asking it to tell jokes it's now an alarm clock that tells me the weather once or twice a day.
  - beagle3 4y ago
    It also spies on you.
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      Just to improve customer accommodation of course.
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    Aside from home automation related requests, ours is basically voice controlled alarms, timers, and conversion calculators. In all of those cases they are superior to alternatives imo.
    - Psychokiller 4y ago
      These are so basic operations that it cannot be true that an online Alexa or Google Home assistant is better than alts.... If you talk about getting informations, routes and others, maybe, but for a simple alarm or a timer, who would require online connectivity....
      - cptskippy 4y ago
        > but for a simple alarm or a timer, who would require online connectivity.... It's about the experience and ease of use. Sure I can set timers on my phone all day long or lookup conversions but the experience sucks compared to a voice interface. Open solutions like Alice, Mycroft, and Ada all kinda suck unless you leverage the same online services powering Google, Siri, and Alexa. We have Amazon Echos and these are some of the situations where a voice assistant just works better than anything else: - You're standing at the kitchen counter multiplying a recipe. It is easier and faster to say "Alexa, how many tablespoons is 9 teaspoons?" than almost anything else. - You're making Thanksgiving dinner. "Alexa, set a mashed potato timer for 20 minutes. How much time is left on the Turkey Basting Timer?" - The dentist recommends brushing your teeth for 2 minutes, I setup a routine so when my kiddo is brushing their teeth they can say "Alexa, I'm brushing my teeth." And Alexa will say "Starting the tooth timer" then make a silly noise every 30 seconds to indicate they need to switch brushing top inside to top outside to bottom inside to bottom outside. - I'm wood working in the garage and need to multiply a dimension. You can't beat screaming "Alexa, what's 24 times 9/16ths?" and getting your answer without having to lookup from what you're doing, find your phone, or do the math in your head. - You're putting the kiddo to bed and got home late from practice. So you both decide to let them sleep in a little. It's easier to say "Alexa, cancel the 6:30 alarm and set an alarm for 7 am." and Alexa might ask "Do you want to cancel all alarms or just tomorrow's" and you say "Just tomorrow's". No fiddling with the Alarm clock or remembering to adjust it the next evening.
remram 4y ago
How good is the speech-to-text in practice? I have found that opensource s2t models are extremely far from Google/Apple ones unfortunately, and make a complete assistant really frustrating to use.
- nshm 4y ago
  Did you try Vosk https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api or Wenet https://github.com/wenet-e2e/wenet https://github.com/wenet-e2e/wenet
  - remram 4y ago
    They both seem to use Kaldi which I have tried before. edit: Nope Vosk is doing much better than I expected. Thanks a lot for the recommendation!
    - mkmk3 4y ago
      Glad you came back to add the edit, I tried Vosk recently and was also very surprised. Restored some hope for these systems that I wasn't anticipating, with some work I felt a nice hands-free dev environment is in reach.
  - Psychokiller 4y ago
    Yes, but at the time I did it wasn't really usable. I shall have a look at it again, thank you
- philipp2310 4y ago
  Alice offers a few different STT options. While you can stay completely offline, depending on the language and your background noise, indeed the results are not as perfect as the cloud ones. But especially coqui STT (former deepspeech) does a really good job! Another option, if you are a bit more open with "sharing" data and you don't want to miss out the best TTS, is enabling google or azure cloud services - with the big difference, Alice will only send the sound right after detecting your hotword (only while flashing her LED and asking you "yes?" before the recording starts). Nothing else would be shared.
chmod775 4y ago
I realize it's used as a tongue in cheek reference to Resident Evil, but the "Umbrella Logo" is, among other things, trademarked[1][2][3]. I'm not sure about corporate ownership status here, but it would appear that someone's idea of movie merchandise was to sell firearms by registering a company called "Umbrella Corporation Weapons Research Group" in the real world. I could find several "licensed" arms in online stores. Possibly they're doing that to protect their IP, not out of any profit motive. The name of the project won't be a problem, but you might want to steer clear of that particular logo. Entertainment companies can be very touchy about their IP and are known to be litigious. [1] https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/umbrella-corporation-weapons-research-group-1320147/ https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/umbrella-corporation-we... [2] https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/umbrella-corp-4226588/ https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/umbrella-corp-4226588/ [3] Possibly more, but there's thousands of logos labeled "Umbrella" and I don't want to spend all day looking.
- Psychokiller 4y ago
  Hmmm, but I red this at the time: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Umbrella_Corporation_logo.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Umbrella_Corporation...
- philipp2310 4y ago
  true words, thank you. While the projects logo/name exists longer than I'm in the project, I had my thoughts about it as well. I came to the conclusion, there are so many car stickers/unlicensed merch or even companies with a similar logo, there shouldn't be an issue for a small open source project. Maybe a dangerous conclusion, that should be revised when Alice grows :)
  - TingPing 4y ago
    That attitude doesn't reflect well on the project IMO. Very short-sighted and unprofessional.
    - Handytinge 4y ago
lstodd 4y ago
Alice / Алиса is the one from Yandex https://yandex.com/support/m-yandex/alice/talking.html https://yandex.com/support/m-yandex/alice/talking.html
- philipp2310 4y ago
  yeah, was quite shocked when I learned about yandex' Alice.. To be fair: Project Alice is older than yandex Alice and there is nothing but the name connecting these two assistants!
- Psychokiller 4y ago
  Yandex is at least a year younger than Project Alice
Psychokiller 4y ago
Hi all! I'm the main dev, although, @philipp2310 is mostly stearing the boat at the moment. Thank you for all the comments and interest in our Project
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Hmm, Any relation between this Alice project and an earlier Alice AI project, alicebot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Linguistic_Internet_Computer_Entity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Linguistic_Internet...
  - Psychokiller 4y ago
    Not at all
SergeAx 4y ago
Fun fact: Yandex, Russian search engine, ecom and taxi/delivery service has a voice assistant named "Alisa", which is Russian pronounce of Alice.

169 points by jka 4y ago

Offline is the key here. I wrote a short story not so long ago [1] about the educational potential of near-future world where storage gets so dense and cheap that the tide turns back toward local computing, away from the trend of the past 10 years toward "online cloud". What happens when the corpus of all human knowledge really can sit on your table top as the early sci-fi writers predicted? [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
I don't believe storage is the main limiting factor here - availability is. And whether you want to make your data available outside.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  So imagine an IPv6 based world where every household has rock solid high speed networking capability, and a relatively smart firewall deciding what connections to allow and disallow without heavy handed management work.
andy_ppp 4y ago
Really interesting, it makes me think about an AI that understands all the rules of physics and you can ask it questions the way GPT3 does, “design me an f1.4 lens that is low profile and projects light onto a curved 1inch sensor from X feet” or “how do I design a magnetic field to contain plasma at a maximum density with power input below X watts/h”. We really do stand on the edge of a very strange set of possibilities happening…
jancsika 4y ago
> What happens when the corpus of all human knowledge really can sit on your table top as the early sci-fi writers predicted? If reality is any indication, then if it's copyrightable it won't be sitting on your table top: * Set of important facts about the world: not copyrightable. Yet so freely accessible I don't even bother to copy Wikipedia to my table top. * Set of important modern books: copyrightable and mostly still under copyright. Also, probably digitized by Google. Not available for table top copying. * Set of important music scores: copyrightable, but most are by dead composers, and most are out of copyright. Hooray! Except the IMLSP had to go offline for almost a year, seek legal help and create a staff-review process for uploads to make absolutely sure no publishers could sue him out of existence. * That full video of Will Forte playing white supremacist "Hamilton Whiteman" at Seth Meyer's actual rehearsal dinner: copyrightable. I actually watched the whole thing at one point, but it apparently got a copyright claim so I can't share it with anyone. I just added this one on the off chance someone on here has a copy and feels daring, because dammit, it was funny, and I want to watch it again. I feel like the tech world needs a decent political mover-and-shaker who could make a Glengarry Glen Ross style speech at this point: something about how with the tools you got available he could go out and make legal table top human knowledge boxes a reality tonight...
- thesz 4y ago
  Consider Cyc [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc It deduces relations from set of facts in it's database. If you have human knowledge from wikipedia on your desktop, you can deduce your own facts using Cyc's engine or something else. It will be fun to tinker with. You can even start your own conspiracy theory, because you can.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > If reality is any indication, then if it's copyrightable it won't be sitting on your table top: Absolutely spot on. Indeed, the story was an oblique advocacy for SciHub and an argument as to how the digital entertainment industry and publishers may eventually be the greatest obstacle to human progress.
- mdaniel 4y ago
astrange 4y ago
The set of all human knowledge doesn't seem to be accessible anywhere right now; it's not on the open internet at least. Try "how do you make an entire digital camera starting with enough of the right kinds of sand?". Some of this is a trade secret, some of it is in other languages, some of it can't be explained by any person in the production process because you can't describe things you only know through muscle memory.
charcircuit 4y ago
The corpus of knowledge is forever growing and it grows faster than many people's internet connection.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  That sounds like a truism, but actually I am not sure it follows. You may be thinking of data, but knowledge is different. Consider the ordering of: Signals (semantic/non-entropy (changes that have meaning)) Data (interpretable signals) Information (data that informs) Useful Information Knowledge (justifiable, true and useful information in context) Wisdom (knowledge applicable to human survival and evolution) Then, given Sturgeons Law that 99% of everything is rubbish at each level then "knowledge" is not growing as fast as you might think (and much human knowledge is lost at a terrible rate). Humans presently generate about 2-5 Exabytes of raw data per year. Only a small fraction of that is information, considerably less is useful information, and some fraction of that - in the form of good quality books, journals, papers etc, encoded without redundancy, is probably in the order of 100s of gigabytes per year. For over 70 years a shelf of encyclopedias was considered approximate summary of essential knowledge. It's not implausible that storage growth could overtake knowledge production at some point in the not to distance future.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    >Then, given Sturgeons Law that 99% of everything is rubbish at each level then "knowledge" is not growing as fast as you might think Sturgeon's law was 90%, also that's a mighty big given to entrust to a snarky Science Fiction writer's quip explaining why so much Science Fiction in his time sucked.
api 4y ago
It already can if it’s mostly text. Have you checked hard drive prices lately?
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  Not ALL of human knowledge - and many(most?) might cringe to consider it so, but wikipedia english text only was 8GB or so in 2013 when I put it onto an ereader. Was handy to be able to read about the places as I travelled to them without internet connectivity. Might be more now but storage has likely outpaced it in growth.
nobody9999 4y ago
>the educational potential of near-future world where storage gets so dense and cheap that the tide turns back toward local computing, away from the trend of the past 10 years toward "online cloud" I'd argue that storage is already dense and cheap enough to "turn the tide back toward local computing." The reasons why the cloud (more precisely: someone else's servers) and all manner of non-local computing and storage became so entrenched was (at least in the US) that ISPs mostly offered (and still do) asymmetric internet links for "consumer" plans, refuse to provide static IP addressess (IPv4 and IPv6) and actively discourage (via port blocking/throttling) running servers on such links. And when download/upload bandwidth ratios (for my links they're 20 and 17) are so skewed towards downloads, hosting content becomes less viable. Add poorly managed physical plant and resistance to spending money on upgrades, and you have unreliable links with inadequate bandwidth. After decades of this, is it any wonder that centralized storage/compute/streaming services found a ready niche, and have exploited the anti-consumer/anti-competitive actions and policies of the big ISPs to the point that many folks don't realize it could be any other way. Want to move back toward local computing? Make decently fast, symmetric internet links the norm. Getting that done (at least in the US) will be a tall order. And even if/when we get there, such a shift won't happen all at once, especially since centralized services will fight tooth and nail to keep their customers (for paid services) and product (for "free" services) at our expense. However, once decently fast symmetric bandwidth is the norm for "consumer" internet links, decentralization will follow. It would likely take a while, especially since many (most?) of the developers of decentralized solutions (I'm looking at you, diaspora, mastodon and matrix, among others) make self-hosting their software inaccessible to non-technical folks[0]. There are many great reasons to move away from centralized compute/storage/streaming services, but there are significant barriers to doing so, at multiple levels of the network infrastructure. And more's the pity. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783477

rimeice 4y ago

Why do virtual assistants seem to always have female names?

manfre 4y ago
For this project, the readme has a section about the name. tl;dr it's name is from resident evil.
- glowingly 4y ago
  In that game/movie world, it is the name of an AI. Maybe some passdown influence from Star Trek's ship computer, which had a female voice?
  - chmod775 4y ago
    > In that game/movie world, it is the name of an AI. Alice is the name of the main character. The supercomputer/AI was called Red Queen. Though it gets a bit muddled, not least because the Red Queen was created using the template of one Alicia Marcus, of whom Alice herself is a clone.
    - Psychokiller 4y ago
      Thank you for the correct analysis of my thoughts at the moment I started Project Alice :-) Often people will think that Alice and the Red Queen is an easy mix and a wrong shortcut to Resident Evil. But indeed, the Red Queen, in the MOVIES, is at the image of Alicia. When RE last part came out, I wanted to include the white queen in Project Alice' mood, but that's not done yet
astrange 4y ago
In the 90s they had male(?) names like Clippy, Bonzi Buddy and Microsoft Bob. Now we still have Bixby, which sort-of sounds like an English butler.
- 4y ago

i_like_waiting 4y ago

I was already thinking about selling my sould (getting internet connected voice assistant). So I am super glad that there is an offline alternative. I didn't even know it is possible, but now I feel kind of obligated to put those $30 I would pay otherwise towards this project instead

tootie 4y ago
I finally caved and got an Echo a few months ago. After a few weeks of my kids asking it to tell jokes it's now an alarm clock that tells me the weather once or twice a day.
- beagle3 4y ago
  It also spies on you.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    Just to improve customer accommodation of course.
- cptskippy 4y ago
  Aside from home automation related requests, ours is basically voice controlled alarms, timers, and conversion calculators. In all of those cases they are superior to alternatives imo.
  - Psychokiller 4y ago
    These are so basic operations that it cannot be true that an online Alexa or Google Home assistant is better than alts.... If you talk about getting informations, routes and others, maybe, but for a simple alarm or a timer, who would require online connectivity....
    - cptskippy 4y ago
      > but for a simple alarm or a timer, who would require online connectivity.... It's about the experience and ease of use. Sure I can set timers on my phone all day long or lookup conversions but the experience sucks compared to a voice interface. Open solutions like Alice, Mycroft, and Ada all kinda suck unless you leverage the same online services powering Google, Siri, and Alexa. We have Amazon Echos and these are some of the situations where a voice assistant just works better than anything else: - You're standing at the kitchen counter multiplying a recipe. It is easier and faster to say "Alexa, how many tablespoons is 9 teaspoons?" than almost anything else. - You're making Thanksgiving dinner. "Alexa, set a mashed potato timer for 20 minutes. How much time is left on the Turkey Basting Timer?" - The dentist recommends brushing your teeth for 2 minutes, I setup a routine so when my kiddo is brushing their teeth they can say "Alexa, I'm brushing my teeth." And Alexa will say "Starting the tooth timer" then make a silly noise every 30 seconds to indicate they need to switch brushing top inside to top outside to bottom inside to bottom outside. - I'm wood working in the garage and need to multiply a dimension. You can't beat screaming "Alexa, what's 24 times 9/16ths?" and getting your answer without having to lookup from what you're doing, find your phone, or do the math in your head. - You're putting the kiddo to bed and got home late from practice. So you both decide to let them sleep in a little. It's easier to say "Alexa, cancel the 6:30 alarm and set an alarm for 7 am." and Alexa might ask "Do you want to cancel all alarms or just tomorrow's" and you say "Just tomorrow's". No fiddling with the Alarm clock or remembering to adjust it the next evening.

remram 4y ago

How good is the speech-to-text in practice? I have found that opensource s2t models are extremely far from Google/Apple ones unfortunately, and make a complete assistant really frustrating to use.

nshm 4y ago
Did you try Vosk https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api or Wenet https://github.com/wenet-e2e/wenet https://github.com/wenet-e2e/wenet
- remram 4y ago
  They both seem to use Kaldi which I have tried before. edit: Nope Vosk is doing much better than I expected. Thanks a lot for the recommendation!
  - mkmk3 4y ago
    Glad you came back to add the edit, I tried Vosk recently and was also very surprised. Restored some hope for these systems that I wasn't anticipating, with some work I felt a nice hands-free dev environment is in reach.
- Psychokiller 4y ago
  Yes, but at the time I did it wasn't really usable. I shall have a look at it again, thank you
philipp2310 4y ago
Alice offers a few different STT options. While you can stay completely offline, depending on the language and your background noise, indeed the results are not as perfect as the cloud ones. But especially coqui STT (former deepspeech) does a really good job! Another option, if you are a bit more open with "sharing" data and you don't want to miss out the best TTS, is enabling google or azure cloud services - with the big difference, Alice will only send the sound right after detecting your hotword (only while flashing her LED and asking you "yes?" before the recording starts). Nothing else would be shared.

chmod775 4y ago

I realize it's used as a tongue in cheek reference to Resident Evil, but the "Umbrella Logo" is, among other things, trademarked[1][2][3]. I'm not sure about corporate ownership status here, but it would appear that someone's idea of movie merchandise was to sell firearms by registering a company called "Umbrella Corporation Weapons Research Group" in the real world. I could find several "licensed" arms in online stores. Possibly they're doing that to protect their IP, not out of any profit motive. The name of the project won't be a problem, but you might want to steer clear of that particular logo. Entertainment companies can be very touchy about their IP and are known to be litigious. [1] https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/umbrella-corporation-weapons-research-group-1320147/ https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/umbrella-corporation-we... [2] https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/umbrella-corp-4226588/ https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/umbrella-corp-4226588/ [3] Possibly more, but there's thousands of logos labeled "Umbrella" and I don't want to spend all day looking.

Psychokiller 4y ago
Hmmm, but I red this at the time: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Umbrella_Corporation_logo.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Umbrella_Corporation...
philipp2310 4y ago
true words, thank you. While the projects logo/name exists longer than I'm in the project, I had my thoughts about it as well. I came to the conclusion, there are so many car stickers/unlicensed merch or even companies with a similar logo, there shouldn't be an issue for a small open source project. Maybe a dangerous conclusion, that should be revised when Alice grows :)
- TingPing 4y ago
  That attitude doesn't reflect well on the project IMO. Very short-sighted and unprofessional.
  - Handytinge 4y ago

lstodd 4y ago

Alice / Алиса is the one from Yandex https://yandex.com/support/m-yandex/alice/talking.html https://yandex.com/support/m-yandex/alice/talking.html

philipp2310 4y ago
yeah, was quite shocked when I learned about yandex' Alice.. To be fair: Project Alice is older than yandex Alice and there is nothing but the name connecting these two assistants!
Psychokiller 4y ago
Yandex is at least a year younger than Project Alice

Psychokiller 4y ago

Hi all! I'm the main dev, although, @philipp2310 is mostly stearing the boat at the moment. Thank you for all the comments and interest in our Project

joe_the_user 4y ago
Hmm, Any relation between this Alice project and an earlier Alice AI project, alicebot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Linguistic_Internet_Computer_Entity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Linguistic_Internet...
- Psychokiller 4y ago
  Not at all

SergeAx 4y ago

Fun fact: Yandex, Russian search engine, ecom and taxi/delivery service has a voice assistant named "Alisa", which is Russian pronounce of Alice.