17 ms·

Mycroft – open source voice assistant

286 points by kitebive 4y ago

NikkiA 4y ago
Huh, didn't expect to see a Mycroft Holmes reference today. Picroft looks interesting.
incomingpain 4y ago
$350 for a 4.5" CRT looking thing? OR $90 for echo show 8" which does many more things. *Including government surveillance. I wonder how many people have preordered.
- glenstein 4y ago
  Under the specs, all I saw for display was: >4.3″ IPS wide-viewing angle, full color, touchsceen Were you able to find more information somewhere else about it being crt?
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    He didn't say it's a CRT, he said it's a 'CRT looking thing', which it definitely is with the thick extension behind the monitor. Personally I do like the design but I'm quite fond of Fallout/Alien style retro displays so YMMV. As a personal assistant type thing the original vertical prototype with eyes seemed better though.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    He said CRT looking, I assume to mean “old-fashioned and bulky/boxy”, not that it actually was a CRT based display.
- JosephRedfern 4y ago
  This isn't a CRT.
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    I realize it's not an actual CRT, it looks like a CRT.
  - kitebive 4y ago
    Sorry if I ask, but what does CRT mean?
    - Brendinooo 4y ago
      Cathode Ray Tube, the kind of monitor/television that existed before LCD screens became popular.
- srmarm 4y ago
  There was another post[0] on here today about Amazon losing $10B on Alexa this year. The only other big player is Google who I assume must also run the division at a big loss - at least on the hardware side of things as I've got loads of their devices dotted around the house most were given to me free or at a stupidly low cost (£20 each). Even the ones like this with a full colour screen I've only paid £49 for. It's an interesting market that I don't think either has figured out too well. Anecdotally, I've not really seen them used for shopping or even really shopping lists and the search model doesn't seem quite as lucrative as if someone used their phone or computer to search. The one thing they do seem to do well in is as an introduction to - and hub for - the smarthome but I struggle to see how that will make these big subsides viable. Which brings us back to this. A bit ahead of it's time perhaps but if Amazon/Google pull back their subsidies then this kind of thing might be where we have to go. I'd be happier not using Google Home and have mostly moved to zigbee switches with home assistant to control now anyway. Maybe voice control was a bit of a flash in the pan? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700792
  - joseda-hg 4y ago
    Google to some degree can justify it better considering that Assistant is ALSO present in Android They need to have some sort of version existing to compete with Siri, and can also shoehorn integrations that wouldn't quite work for Amazon Were not for this[0] ever expanding page, Assistant seems like the more reliable option [0] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- Brendinooo 4y ago
  They actually have some data for you here to give you a sense of scale: https://mycroft.ai/mark-ii-status/ https://mycroft.ai/mark-ii-status/
- UltraViolence 4y ago
  Which is essentially a Raspberry Pi 4 with an LCD display. However, not wanting to spend time and money integrating the hardware and the software and building an enclosure around it I'd say it's still a fair deal. Amazon is merely selling devices at cost, which is why they're losing $10 billion a year on Alexa. All this is probably going to stop soon so people end up with useless devices. Hopefully hackers will be able to run MyCroft on them.
theCrowing 4y ago
I use Mycroft for around 2-3 years on a raspberry pi with an microphone array and the quality is still not nowhere near the level were I would give it to my mom or granny.
- EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
  Depends on what it's used for imo. I've got the same setup and--apart from some sexism in the voice recognition--the basics work flawlessly. Once it's up and running it's trivial to set timers, check the weather, do basic unit conversions, etc... Maybe once a month it freezes and it just needs to be restarted, anyone can do that who can get used to talking to a robot in the first place. The more complicated stuff, I agree is not fit for people who aren't comfortable with a terminal. I also use it to control my lights and play spotify, but I'm only able to do that because I'm comfortable messing around with it and have the skills (and desire) to debug it when it breaks every other week. It's nowhere near as polished as Alexa or similar, but it's good for the basics or for hobbyists who don't want to be spied on.
  - veidr 4y ago
    > sexism in the voice recognition What does this mean? Mycroft prefers taking orders from dudes?
    - EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
      Yes. It reliably responds to the wakeword ("hey Mycroft") from men, and only responds about 50% of the time to women. When my sister visits, it almost never responded to her for example. And in my personal experience, I used to have a very deep voice and it always responded to me. I decided I would rather have a more androgynous voice and did some voice training to accomplish that and use a pretty neutral pitch. Now it only responds to my normal voice about 50% of the time, so I intentionally drop my voice an octave whenever I speak to it. But somehow it's not just about pitch either. I have friends who are trans men, and speak in a deep voice but they still have trouble getting Mycroft to respond.
veidr 4y ago
Would love to read about experiences actually using this (I mean Mycroft in general) — good, bad, or otherwise. Also, though: why don't we have "text assistants"? Seems to me the process of deciphering spoken text is (or should be) entirely orthogonal to performing the actual task — changing the lighting, cranking up the AC/heat, arming the security perimeter, or whatever. I think the reason is that voice recognition is hard and so far only the "BIGASS TECH!!!" corporations have been able to make it "mom or granny ready" — and they have no incentive to do that for free and let us make our own mash ups. They want to wall us into their ecosystems. So from that standpoint, this looks pretty cool to me — even if the voice recognition isn't as good as the big three. OTOH, to rebut my own point: I got the new Apple Watch Ultra and I noticed that I can map the side button to a "shortcut" (the Apple term for a script you create yourself to automate something) that just transcribes whatever I say, and sends it as text over SSH to any host I want. On my local LAN, the delivery time is well under 1000ms. So that's getting pretty close to being able to use Siri as a generic voice recognizer, and then piping the input into whatever arbitrary/homebrew system I want. To do it purely with voice though you have to be like "Hey Siri, do the funky chicken" (after naming the shortcut "do the funky chicken"). And then say the actual command phrase you want your home automation to do.
- EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
  This is actually how Mycroft handles it, more or less. The wakeword ("hey Mycroft") is done on-device, but everything you say after that is sent to a speech-to-text API. That text is then routed to the appropriate skill to handle. So when you're writing the skill you only worry about the content of that text https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/overview#speech-to-text-stt https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/over...
- moffkalast 4y ago
  > why don't we have "text assistants" We do, it's called typing things into Google.
  - HankB99 4y ago
    Will that initiate actions like the voice thing does? I thought it just returned search results.
Brendinooo 4y ago
I backed on IndieGoGo (in late 2018 I think), then helped crowdfund on StartEngine. I want so badly to speak well of these guys, and since I invested I want them to succeed, but it's been getting harder to do so. They deserve credit for being reasonably transparent about their processes though. Their blog has been very interesting to follow. They had a ton of issues trying to work out their original design, then the pandemic hit. So in a way, timing has been bad. In the meantime they spent a lot of time on the software side, then on the fundraising side, then deck shuffling at the top, and now they're finally shipping something that looks nothing like what the Kickstarter showed. Instead of being close to the $200 price point they wanted to be at, it's currently $349, then will go to $500. They're at a point where if they don't get sales at those prices, they're not going to be able to deliver to backers; at least that's how they framed it when they discussed rollout. They are actually shipping, though! Which didn't look like a guarantee for awhile. However, the reviews have been a bit lukewarm; [this][1] being an example. They had a way to make skills and they apparently changed it in order to better accommodate their final product, so it seems like there's been a bit of fracturing of the ecosystem as a result. In conclusion: I'd love for you to support them! I still believe this segment needs a player like Mycroft, Mycroft can be that player, and I really want to not have my investments go to waste. But I 100% would not blame you if you looked at the company's arc and said "no thanks". [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Mycroftai/comments/yitzzk/mycroft_mark_ii_review/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Mycroftai/comments/yitzzk/mycroft_m...
- nshm 4y ago
  There is also a strange story of speech developer leaving them a week ago https://community.rhasspy.org/t/rhasspy-is-joining-nabu-casa/4007 https://community.rhasspy.org/t/rhasspy-is-joining-nabu-casa...
  - SEJeff 4y ago
    That's great news for Home Assistant however!
- aartav 4y ago
  Kudos to them for shipping a product. I looked into them a few weeks ago because I am tired of the "Did you know.." and "Can I add that to your cart?" from Alexa. When I saw the device I was really disappointed. I can just never see getting one - it doesn't need a screen (cause it should be hidden) and why did they make it look like a 1960s sci-fi movie thing? IMHO it looks terrible.
rexreed 4y ago
The voice assistant space is dying: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... Some of the comments below are part of the explanation why. It doesn't work as well as people were hoping, and it's a solution in search of a problem with limited application and it seems little monetization. The above article sums it up better from the big tech company's perspective.
- Brendinooo 4y ago
  The "voice assistant space" also includes Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, so it's not going anywhere. I'd contend that it's absolutely not a solution in search of a problem; it's much more of an unsolved problem, and a big part of the "why" is - voice recognition/assistance tech still maturing - major players are insisting that the tech supports their walled gardens - price points are still a problem The last two creates a conundrum: a lot of times tech prices come down by selling expensive stuff to rich people until the hardware becomes commoditized. But for a good voice assistant, you need a lot of up-front investment at scale. Unfortunately, the companies that are able to do this are also controlling the hardware that can use it, which limits its ability to spread and be useful. This is why I think Mycroft is important to support: 1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors 2. Part of Mycroft's pitch to businesses is that they can make custom solutions. There are probably a thousand big businesses that might want to get into this space but don't want to rely on Amazon because they want to control the experience and not give up their data. Maybe Target wants to stick virtual assistants around their stores, or maybe a hospital wants to give tools for surgeons. I also think there's an opportunity for voice control in home stereo, where someone decouples the speakers from everything else. It's still annoying to work with Bluetooth in 2022, and Sonos is still pricey, and another walled garden. I'd love to have a simple controller that connects a dumb speaker to Wi-Fi and lets me voice-control it to play music from a library of my choosing. That's not a thing yet, right?
  - liotier 4y ago
    > custom solutions Especially interesting as voice recognition is much easier, cheaper and more efficient within the limited space of a specific usage.
xrd 4y ago
I have one of these devices. I'm still a bit mystified about what I want to use it for. But, after reading these threads, I've now got a few ideas that make me very excited. I have come to despise the Google/Alexa/Siri devices. I'll explain why. I hate that Google Home devices always give you a direct answer when you ask a question. The reason I hate this is because my kids use it to get an answer, without any work, without any thinking, without any consideration that there might be context to the answer. If they were to research and read about the question, they would learn so much more. But, they, like all people, want a simple and compact answer. And, I'm sure Google engineers have their RSUs tied to some KPI that says "make answers as simple and compact" so it will never come out any way other than this from Google. I hate that Google permits my kids to play the same damn song over and over again. (Cue sentimental music...). In my day, we listened to the radio and it might have been bad for my dad for five minutes and he scowled the whole way as enjoyed some utterly awful pop song, but then that song ended and he didn't have to listen to it for a few hours. Modern radio is worse, but at least you can take a break for an hour before they play (and are paid to play) the same song over and over. I hate the surveillance aspect of Google. I don't want to have profiles generated of my kids such that when Google revenues dip in a few years they are enticed by an offer from that shady insurance conglomerate that really wants to know whether any of them discussed depression or racism. So, if I can use a Mycroft device to: * Permit them to ask questions, but give them answers in a way they have to dig and think and explore, that would be really cool. I'm sure this isn't easy, but it will never happen with Google/Alexa/Siri because they only care about MONETIZING those interactions. * Give me more control over how media is consumed. The people working at YouTube will never have a KPI for "make sure you can only play one song per hour" and Google Home will never have that KPI, so it will never happen. That will never be something they can MONETIZE. It seems like it will be a lot more challenging to get music onto my Mycroft, but I prefer to play Jazz radio and because there still are live streams, I think you could get off the YouTube/Spotify/Amazon music train anyway. I got rid of so much of my music, but you can play shared files: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/mark-ii/basic-commands#jukebox * Forget the worries about surveillance. Mycroft right now uses Google for text to speech, but it can anonymize it enough for me not to worry as much.
- nottorp 4y ago
karencarits 4y ago
I really liked the idea from an earlier post with continuous recording + Whisper for transcription + keyword based actions. The drawback is asynchronous execution of your actions, but that setup seems very flexible! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608437
voakbasda 4y ago
The recent comments on the Mycroft kickstarter [0], which was funded four years ago, indicate that the company is shipping preorders. However, only 10% of the units are going to their backers. Instead they are selling the units to new customers. If you are backer 2000, they might not fulfill your order for years to come, based on the production rate quoted there by their new CEO. This is not a viable way to treat your original, most ebthusiatic customers. They will go on forums like HN and bitterly complain, warning other potential customers not to invest in a company that clearly does not respect its users. [0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-mark-ii-the-open-voice-assistant https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-m...
wolczek 4y ago
They use Google cloud speech-to-text API, one of the key technology. https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/overview#speech-to-text-stt https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/over... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- arbol 4y ago
  The pi isn't really fast enough to process the speech in real time. deepspeech by mozilla was cited as an offline alternative to the Google speech API but it's difficult to set up with Mycroft and doesn't work very well (lack of data and lag - https://mycroft.ai/voice-mycroft-ai/ https://mycroft.ai/voice-mycroft-ai/). Because of this, Mozilla set up Common Voice (https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en) to help build open datasets of voice recordings.
  - shagie 4y ago
    > The pi isn't really fast enough to process the speech in real time. If you've got an iPhone... put it in to airplane mode so that it is local only. You'll note that Siri no longer works when you do this. However... open up the notes app and tap the microphone. Do some interesting text... > Mister Smith said that he wanted a two by four and half of a pie. (if you don't have an iDevice, it transcribes this as: > Mr. Smith said he wanted a 2 x 4 and 1/2 of a pie That is without a network and done in real time. We can compare the relative processing capabilities of an iPhone and the RPi, but offline speech to text is feasible on a device of limited capabilities. Additionally, you can do a limited vocabulary speech to text on chip ( https://www.imagesco.com/articles/hm2007/SpeechRecognitionTutorial03.html https://www.imagesco.com/articles/hm2007/SpeechRecognitionTu... - https://www.amazon.com/HM2007-Speech-Recognition-Integrated-Circuit/dp/B01D942E5C https://www.amazon.com/HM2007-Speech-Recognition-Integrated-... ). This can handle the specific incantation common tasks (think closer to how a car voice control works - say exactly these words in this order), but that can help with performance for things that are often done.
    - one-another-dev 4y ago
      > If you've got an iPhone... put it in to airplane mode so that it is local only. You'll note that Siri no longer works when you do this This is not true anymore. Latest iPhone models have offline Siri working to some extent
UltraViolence 4y ago
I like it. Now they simply have to make it fully functional and add some intelligent AI.
acidburnNSA 4y ago
I installed their self-hosted minic3 tts the other day to add a voice to my home assistant on prem smart home. It sounds unbelievably good compared to the picotts crap I was using before. Pretty stoked. Now I want to try getting the voice assistant hooked up too. https://mycroft.ai/mimic-3/ https://mycroft.ai/mimic-3/
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  Sadly their German voices sound broken, as if they stress and lengthen/shorten random syllables. And that's with their demo text.
  - synesthesiam 4y ago
    Sorry about that. I'm going to be working more closely with native German speakers to get it right!
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Why is this so damn expensive? I have plenty of good hardware available to run the compute for this thing. Just make a daemon/app architecture where I can use my phone as a microphone and run daemons on whatever hardware I need to control. I just don't see this being worth the money. Hundreds of $ to make switching music slightly more convenient just seems like a colossal waste of money to me.
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  Agreed. I don’t need a screen or a loud speaker on a voice assistant box. Just make it small and cheap, as promised.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  I think we're spoiled by Google and Amazon losing so much money for so long For example, I noticed a couple years ago at the store that a regular featureless analog wall clock was more expensive than an Echo Dot These guys need to pay for their software dev out of hardware sales and can't hope for a runaway success yet, so of course it'll cost a painfully lot more
ccn0p 4y ago
Mark II sounds like he'd rather be sleeping than helping the person in the demo video.
splitrocket 4y ago
The key feature I haven't seen any of these opensource projects implement is microphone response coordination: If you have multiple microphones and speakers, which one responds? My google home's are terrible at this: often one in another room responds, but at least it's only one. When I tried to run Genie (https://genie.stanford.edu/ https://genie.stanford.edu/) I had multiple devices responding simultaneously. It was a disaster. For me, this is the core feature that will enable me to swap out my corporate listening devices for an opensource, cloud-free alternative.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
laputan_machine 4y ago
I love the idea, but I think this isn't going to be "the one". It's VC funded, the VCs are going to want to get a RoI. And we all know where that leads...
- cjtrowbridge 4y ago
  So fork it; it's FOSS.
cjtrowbridge 4y ago
Mycroft was the first thing I thought of when I read the first press releases from OpenAI about Whisper! Mycroft has historically used Google for voice recognition. Exciting to see self-hosted alternatives like Whisper coming out.
walterbell 4y ago
Is there a good, affordable, open-ish dev platform with an array of far-field microphones? If not, would it be possible to teardown an Amazon Echo Dot and attach their microphone array to an ODROID Arm SBC? Might depend on whether the Alexa microphone array is using a dedicated audio processor chip for echo cancellation. A web search finds this 4-mike array for $63, https://www.robotshop.com/en/seeedstudio-respeaker-mic-array-v20-far-field-4-pdm-microphones.html https://www.robotshop.com/en/seeedstudio-respeaker-mic-array... Google had an audio dev kits for schools based on their TPU and RPi, https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice/ https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice/
borissk 4y ago
I hope this project makes into people's homes, but I really doubt it. Google invests so much resources into their Assistant (a recruiter recently told me they have over 1000 vacancies). Given that Google has it's own very advanced and very efficient cloud infrastructure, their own ML processors and an army of devs and AI scientists, their assistant will always be cheaper and "smarter" than a device build by a small company on top of an open source project.

286 points by kitebive 4y ago

Huh, didn't expect to see a Mycroft Holmes reference today. Picroft looks interesting.

$350 for a 4.5" CRT looking thing? OR $90 for echo show 8" which does many more things. *Including government surveillance. I wonder how many people have preordered.

glenstein 4y ago
Under the specs, all I saw for display was: >4.3″ IPS wide-viewing angle, full color, touchsceen Were you able to find more information somewhere else about it being crt?
- moffkalast 4y ago
  He didn't say it's a CRT, he said it's a 'CRT looking thing', which it definitely is with the thick extension behind the monitor. Personally I do like the design but I'm quite fond of Fallout/Alien style retro displays so YMMV. As a personal assistant type thing the original vertical prototype with eyes seemed better though.
- dspillett 4y ago
  He said CRT looking, I assume to mean “old-fashioned and bulky/boxy”, not that it actually was a CRT based display.
JosephRedfern 4y ago
This isn't a CRT.
- incomingpain 4y ago
  I realize it's not an actual CRT, it looks like a CRT.
- kitebive 4y ago
  Sorry if I ask, but what does CRT mean?
  - Brendinooo 4y ago
    Cathode Ray Tube, the kind of monitor/television that existed before LCD screens became popular.
srmarm 4y ago
There was another post[0] on here today about Amazon losing $10B on Alexa this year. The only other big player is Google who I assume must also run the division at a big loss - at least on the hardware side of things as I've got loads of their devices dotted around the house most were given to me free or at a stupidly low cost (£20 each). Even the ones like this with a full colour screen I've only paid £49 for. It's an interesting market that I don't think either has figured out too well. Anecdotally, I've not really seen them used for shopping or even really shopping lists and the search model doesn't seem quite as lucrative as if someone used their phone or computer to search. The one thing they do seem to do well in is as an introduction to - and hub for - the smarthome but I struggle to see how that will make these big subsides viable. Which brings us back to this. A bit ahead of it's time perhaps but if Amazon/Google pull back their subsidies then this kind of thing might be where we have to go. I'd be happier not using Google Home and have mostly moved to zigbee switches with home assistant to control now anyway. Maybe voice control was a bit of a flash in the pan? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700792
- joseda-hg 4y ago
  Google to some degree can justify it better considering that Assistant is ALSO present in Android They need to have some sort of version existing to compete with Siri, and can also shoehorn integrations that wouldn't quite work for Amazon Were not for this[0] ever expanding page, Assistant seems like the more reliable option [0] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
Brendinooo 4y ago
They actually have some data for you here to give you a sense of scale: https://mycroft.ai/mark-ii-status/ https://mycroft.ai/mark-ii-status/
UltraViolence 4y ago
Which is essentially a Raspberry Pi 4 with an LCD display. However, not wanting to spend time and money integrating the hardware and the software and building an enclosure around it I'd say it's still a fair deal. Amazon is merely selling devices at cost, which is why they're losing $10 billion a year on Alexa. All this is probably going to stop soon so people end up with useless devices. Hopefully hackers will be able to run MyCroft on them.

theCrowing 4y ago

I use Mycroft for around 2-3 years on a raspberry pi with an microphone array and the quality is still not nowhere near the level were I would give it to my mom or granny.

EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
Depends on what it's used for imo. I've got the same setup and--apart from some sexism in the voice recognition--the basics work flawlessly. Once it's up and running it's trivial to set timers, check the weather, do basic unit conversions, etc... Maybe once a month it freezes and it just needs to be restarted, anyone can do that who can get used to talking to a robot in the first place. The more complicated stuff, I agree is not fit for people who aren't comfortable with a terminal. I also use it to control my lights and play spotify, but I'm only able to do that because I'm comfortable messing around with it and have the skills (and desire) to debug it when it breaks every other week. It's nowhere near as polished as Alexa or similar, but it's good for the basics or for hobbyists who don't want to be spied on.
- veidr 4y ago
  > sexism in the voice recognition What does this mean? Mycroft prefers taking orders from dudes?
  - EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
    Yes. It reliably responds to the wakeword ("hey Mycroft") from men, and only responds about 50% of the time to women. When my sister visits, it almost never responded to her for example. And in my personal experience, I used to have a very deep voice and it always responded to me. I decided I would rather have a more androgynous voice and did some voice training to accomplish that and use a pretty neutral pitch. Now it only responds to my normal voice about 50% of the time, so I intentionally drop my voice an octave whenever I speak to it. But somehow it's not just about pitch either. I have friends who are trans men, and speak in a deep voice but they still have trouble getting Mycroft to respond.

veidr 4y ago

Would love to read about experiences actually using this (I mean Mycroft in general) — good, bad, or otherwise. Also, though: why don't we have "text assistants"? Seems to me the process of deciphering spoken text is (or should be) entirely orthogonal to performing the actual task — changing the lighting, cranking up the AC/heat, arming the security perimeter, or whatever. I think the reason is that voice recognition is hard and so far only the "BIGASS TECH!!!" corporations have been able to make it "mom or granny ready" — and they have no incentive to do that for free and let us make our own mash ups. They want to wall us into their ecosystems. So from that standpoint, this looks pretty cool to me — even if the voice recognition isn't as good as the big three. OTOH, to rebut my own point: I got the new Apple Watch Ultra and I noticed that I can map the side button to a "shortcut" (the Apple term for a script you create yourself to automate something) that just transcribes whatever I say, and sends it as text over SSH to any host I want. On my local LAN, the delivery time is well under 1000ms. So that's getting pretty close to being able to use Siri as a generic voice recognizer, and then piping the input into whatever arbitrary/homebrew system I want. To do it purely with voice though you have to be like "Hey Siri, do the funky chicken" (after naming the shortcut "do the funky chicken"). And then say the actual command phrase you want your home automation to do.

EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
This is actually how Mycroft handles it, more or less. The wakeword ("hey Mycroft") is done on-device, but everything you say after that is sent to a speech-to-text API. That text is then routed to the appropriate skill to handle. So when you're writing the skill you only worry about the content of that text https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/overview#speech-to-text-stt https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/over...
moffkalast 4y ago
> why don't we have "text assistants" We do, it's called typing things into Google.
- HankB99 4y ago
  Will that initiate actions like the voice thing does? I thought it just returned search results.

Brendinooo 4y ago

I backed on IndieGoGo (in late 2018 I think), then helped crowdfund on StartEngine. I want so badly to speak well of these guys, and since I invested I want them to succeed, but it's been getting harder to do so. They deserve credit for being reasonably transparent about their processes though. Their blog has been very interesting to follow. They had a ton of issues trying to work out their original design, then the pandemic hit. So in a way, timing has been bad. In the meantime they spent a lot of time on the software side, then on the fundraising side, then deck shuffling at the top, and now they're finally shipping something that looks nothing like what the Kickstarter showed. Instead of being close to the $200 price point they wanted to be at, it's currently $349, then will go to $500. They're at a point where if they don't get sales at those prices, they're not going to be able to deliver to backers; at least that's how they framed it when they discussed rollout. They are actually shipping, though! Which didn't look like a guarantee for awhile. However, the reviews have been a bit lukewarm; [this][1] being an example. They had a way to make skills and they apparently changed it in order to better accommodate their final product, so it seems like there's been a bit of fracturing of the ecosystem as a result. In conclusion: I'd love for you to support them! I still believe this segment needs a player like Mycroft, Mycroft can be that player, and I really want to not have my investments go to waste. But I 100% would not blame you if you looked at the company's arc and said "no thanks". [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Mycroftai/comments/yitzzk/mycroft_mark_ii_review/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Mycroftai/comments/yitzzk/mycroft_m...

nshm 4y ago
There is also a strange story of speech developer leaving them a week ago https://community.rhasspy.org/t/rhasspy-is-joining-nabu-casa/4007 https://community.rhasspy.org/t/rhasspy-is-joining-nabu-casa...
- SEJeff 4y ago
  That's great news for Home Assistant however!
aartav 4y ago
Kudos to them for shipping a product. I looked into them a few weeks ago because I am tired of the "Did you know.." and "Can I add that to your cart?" from Alexa. When I saw the device I was really disappointed. I can just never see getting one - it doesn't need a screen (cause it should be hidden) and why did they make it look like a 1960s sci-fi movie thing? IMHO it looks terrible.

rexreed 4y ago

The voice assistant space is dying: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... Some of the comments below are part of the explanation why. It doesn't work as well as people were hoping, and it's a solution in search of a problem with limited application and it seems little monetization. The above article sums it up better from the big tech company's perspective.

Brendinooo 4y ago
The "voice assistant space" also includes Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, so it's not going anywhere. I'd contend that it's absolutely not a solution in search of a problem; it's much more of an unsolved problem, and a big part of the "why" is - voice recognition/assistance tech still maturing - major players are insisting that the tech supports their walled gardens - price points are still a problem The last two creates a conundrum: a lot of times tech prices come down by selling expensive stuff to rich people until the hardware becomes commoditized. But for a good voice assistant, you need a lot of up-front investment at scale. Unfortunately, the companies that are able to do this are also controlling the hardware that can use it, which limits its ability to spread and be useful. This is why I think Mycroft is important to support: 1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors 2. Part of Mycroft's pitch to businesses is that they can make custom solutions. There are probably a thousand big businesses that might want to get into this space but don't want to rely on Amazon because they want to control the experience and not give up their data. Maybe Target wants to stick virtual assistants around their stores, or maybe a hospital wants to give tools for surgeons. I also think there's an opportunity for voice control in home stereo, where someone decouples the speakers from everything else. It's still annoying to work with Bluetooth in 2022, and Sonos is still pricey, and another walled garden. I'd love to have a simple controller that connects a dumb speaker to Wi-Fi and lets me voice-control it to play music from a library of my choosing. That's not a thing yet, right?
- liotier 4y ago
  > custom solutions Especially interesting as voice recognition is much easier, cheaper and more efficient within the limited space of a specific usage.

xrd 4y ago

I have one of these devices. I'm still a bit mystified about what I want to use it for. But, after reading these threads, I've now got a few ideas that make me very excited. I have come to despise the Google/Alexa/Siri devices. I'll explain why. I hate that Google Home devices always give you a direct answer when you ask a question. The reason I hate this is because my kids use it to get an answer, without any work, without any thinking, without any consideration that there might be context to the answer. If they were to research and read about the question, they would learn so much more. But, they, like all people, want a simple and compact answer. And, I'm sure Google engineers have their RSUs tied to some KPI that says "make answers as simple and compact" so it will never come out any way other than this from Google. I hate that Google permits my kids to play the same damn song over and over again. (Cue sentimental music...). In my day, we listened to the radio and it might have been bad for my dad for five minutes and he scowled the whole way as enjoyed some utterly awful pop song, but then that song ended and he didn't have to listen to it for a few hours. Modern radio is worse, but at least you can take a break for an hour before they play (and are paid to play) the same song over and over. I hate the surveillance aspect of Google. I don't want to have profiles generated of my kids such that when Google revenues dip in a few years they are enticed by an offer from that shady insurance conglomerate that really wants to know whether any of them discussed depression or racism. So, if I can use a Mycroft device to: * Permit them to ask questions, but give them answers in a way they have to dig and think and explore, that would be really cool. I'm sure this isn't easy, but it will never happen with Google/Alexa/Siri because they only care about MONETIZING those interactions. * Give me more control over how media is consumed. The people working at YouTube will never have a KPI for "make sure you can only play one song per hour" and Google Home will never have that KPI, so it will never happen. That will never be something they can MONETIZE. It seems like it will be a lot more challenging to get music onto my Mycroft, but I prefer to play Jazz radio and because there still are live streams, I think you could get off the YouTube/Spotify/Amazon music train anyway. I got rid of so much of my music, but you can play shared files: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/mark-ii/basic-commands#jukebox * Forget the worries about surveillance. Mycroft right now uses Google for text to speech, but it can anonymize it enough for me not to worry as much.

nottorp 4y ago

karencarits 4y ago

I really liked the idea from an earlier post with continuous recording + Whisper for transcription + keyword based actions. The drawback is asynchronous execution of your actions, but that setup seems very flexible! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608437

voakbasda 4y ago

The recent comments on the Mycroft kickstarter [0], which was funded four years ago, indicate that the company is shipping preorders. However, only 10% of the units are going to their backers. Instead they are selling the units to new customers. If you are backer 2000, they might not fulfill your order for years to come, based on the production rate quoted there by their new CEO. This is not a viable way to treat your original, most ebthusiatic customers. They will go on forums like HN and bitterly complain, warning other potential customers not to invest in a company that clearly does not respect its users. [0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-mark-ii-the-open-voice-assistant https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-m...

wolczek 4y ago

They use Google cloud speech-to-text API, one of the key technology. https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/overview#speech-to-text-stt https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/over... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

arbol 4y ago
The pi isn't really fast enough to process the speech in real time. deepspeech by mozilla was cited as an offline alternative to the Google speech API but it's difficult to set up with Mycroft and doesn't work very well (lack of data and lag - https://mycroft.ai/voice-mycroft-ai/ https://mycroft.ai/voice-mycroft-ai/). Because of this, Mozilla set up Common Voice (https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en) to help build open datasets of voice recordings.
- shagie 4y ago
  > The pi isn't really fast enough to process the speech in real time. If you've got an iPhone... put it in to airplane mode so that it is local only. You'll note that Siri no longer works when you do this. However... open up the notes app and tap the microphone. Do some interesting text... > Mister Smith said that he wanted a two by four and half of a pie. (if you don't have an iDevice, it transcribes this as: > Mr. Smith said he wanted a 2 x 4 and 1/2 of a pie That is without a network and done in real time. We can compare the relative processing capabilities of an iPhone and the RPi, but offline speech to text is feasible on a device of limited capabilities. Additionally, you can do a limited vocabulary speech to text on chip ( https://www.imagesco.com/articles/hm2007/SpeechRecognitionTutorial03.html https://www.imagesco.com/articles/hm2007/SpeechRecognitionTu... - https://www.amazon.com/HM2007-Speech-Recognition-Integrated-Circuit/dp/B01D942E5C https://www.amazon.com/HM2007-Speech-Recognition-Integrated-... ). This can handle the specific incantation common tasks (think closer to how a car voice control works - say exactly these words in this order), but that can help with performance for things that are often done.
  - one-another-dev 4y ago
    > If you've got an iPhone... put it in to airplane mode so that it is local only. You'll note that Siri no longer works when you do this This is not true anymore. Latest iPhone models have offline Siri working to some extent

UltraViolence 4y ago

I like it. Now they simply have to make it fully functional and add some intelligent AI.

acidburnNSA 4y ago

I installed their self-hosted minic3 tts the other day to add a voice to my home assistant on prem smart home. It sounds unbelievably good compared to the picotts crap I was using before. Pretty stoked. Now I want to try getting the voice assistant hooked up too. https://mycroft.ai/mimic-3/ https://mycroft.ai/mimic-3/

dividedbyzero 4y ago
Sadly their German voices sound broken, as if they stress and lengthen/shorten random syllables. And that's with their demo text.
- synesthesiam 4y ago
  Sorry about that. I'm going to be working more closely with native German speakers to get it right!

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

Why is this so damn expensive? I have plenty of good hardware available to run the compute for this thing. Just make a daemon/app architecture where I can use my phone as a microphone and run daemons on whatever hardware I need to control. I just don't see this being worth the money. Hundreds of $ to make switching music slightly more convenient just seems like a colossal waste of money to me.

systemicdanna 4y ago
Agreed. I don’t need a screen or a loud speaker on a voice assistant box. Just make it small and cheap, as promised.
Firmwarrior 4y ago
I think we're spoiled by Google and Amazon losing so much money for so long For example, I noticed a couple years ago at the store that a regular featureless analog wall clock was more expensive than an Echo Dot These guys need to pay for their software dev out of hardware sales and can't hope for a runaway success yet, so of course it'll cost a painfully lot more

ccn0p 4y ago

Mark II sounds like he'd rather be sleeping than helping the person in the demo video.

splitrocket 4y ago

The key feature I haven't seen any of these opensource projects implement is microphone response coordination: If you have multiple microphones and speakers, which one responds? My google home's are terrible at this: often one in another room responds, but at least it's only one. When I tried to run Genie (https://genie.stanford.edu/ https://genie.stanford.edu/) I had multiple devices responding simultaneously. It was a disaster. For me, this is the core feature that will enable me to swap out my corporate listening devices for an opensource, cloud-free alternative.

deleted 4y ago
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laputan_machine 4y ago

I love the idea, but I think this isn't going to be "the one". It's VC funded, the VCs are going to want to get a RoI. And we all know where that leads...

cjtrowbridge 4y ago
So fork it; it's FOSS.

cjtrowbridge 4y ago

Mycroft was the first thing I thought of when I read the first press releases from OpenAI about Whisper! Mycroft has historically used Google for voice recognition. Exciting to see self-hosted alternatives like Whisper coming out.

walterbell 4y ago

Is there a good, affordable, open-ish dev platform with an array of far-field microphones? If not, would it be possible to teardown an Amazon Echo Dot and attach their microphone array to an ODROID Arm SBC? Might depend on whether the Alexa microphone array is using a dedicated audio processor chip for echo cancellation. A web search finds this 4-mike array for $63, https://www.robotshop.com/en/seeedstudio-respeaker-mic-array-v20-far-field-4-pdm-microphones.html https://www.robotshop.com/en/seeedstudio-respeaker-mic-array... Google had an audio dev kits for schools based on their TPU and RPi, https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice/ https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice/

borissk 4y ago

I hope this project makes into people's homes, but I really doubt it. Google invests so much resources into their Assistant (a recruiter recently told me they have over 1000 vacancies). Given that Google has it's own very advanced and very efficient cloud infrastructure, their own ML processors and an army of devs and AI scientists, their assistant will always be cheaper and "smarter" than a device build by a small company on top of an open source project.