Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Who's Building The Open Source Version of Siri? (upon2020.com)
We're moving to a world of voice interactions processed by AI. Now Long-time Slashdot reader jernst asks, "Will we ever be able to do that without going through somebody's proprietary silo like Amazon's or Apple's?"
A decade ago, we in the free and open-source community could build our own versions of pretty much any proprietary software system out there, and we did... But is this still true...? Where are the free and/or open-source versions of Siri, Alexa and so forth?
The trouble, of course, is not so much the code, but in the training. The best speech recognition code isn't going to be competitive unless it has been trained with about as many millions of hours of example speech as the closed engines from Apple, Google and so forth have been. How can we do that? The same problem exists with AI. There's plenty of open-source AI code, but how good is it unless it gets training and retraining with gigantic data sets?
And even with that data, Siri gets trained with a massive farm of GPUs running 24/7 -- but how can the open source community replicate that? "Who has a plan, and where can I sign up to it?" asks jernst. So leave your best answers in the comments. Who's building the open source version of Siri?
The trouble, of course, is not so much the code, but in the training. The best speech recognition code isn't going to be competitive unless it has been trained with about as many millions of hours of example speech as the closed engines from Apple, Google and so forth have been. How can we do that? The same problem exists with AI. There's plenty of open-source AI code, but how good is it unless it gets training and retraining with gigantic data sets?
And even with that data, Siri gets trained with a massive farm of GPUs running 24/7 -- but how can the open source community replicate that? "Who has a plan, and where can I sign up to it?" asks jernst. So leave your best answers in the comments. Who's building the open source version of Siri?
Open Source Siri always responds with 'RTFM, noob'. Should be pretty easy.
Yes, this joke has been brought to you by the year 2005.
It only needs two features. First is to keep cutting people off mid sentence. If you are trying to say, "Send message to John Smith." I can have it cut people off before the name John Smith.
.net and getting me to become a sharepoint/MS salesmen. But now things like Visual Studio allow me to program for my Android and iOS just slick as can be. They are tools that work for me.
Then I can randomly have it just wait until the end and then say, "I can't find that person in your contacts, would you like me to search the local area for businesses of that name?" This is regardless of what their actual command was.
What I find interesting about Siri is that it so rarely gets what I am saying correct but when I insult it, it has got that right 100% of the time. "Fuck you Siri, you useless pile of shit." or any one of the zillion creative insults that I have thrown at it have resulted in some "If I had feelings, they would be hurt." So I know that it is not my microphone. It is the pile of crap just not getting what I am saying.
I am saying, "Call John Smith." or "Message John Smith" or "Read last message" or "Play audiobook, the John Smith Story."
I have a twenty minute ride home from work. I once spent the entire twenty minute ride home trying to send a message to someone that said, "I will be home in 20 minutes" (except that as I tried that number was ever growing smaller.)
Nearly the entire time it would just cut me off mid sentence. It would often be in the middle of my message. So it would end up saying "Would you like to send the message "I will"?" I was even trying to give it a run-on sentence such as IWillBeHomeIn20Minutes, so that it wouldn't pick up on a pause as the end. Then there is all the other bullshit that it sucks at. In the previous example it wouldn't confirm to whom I was sending the message. It would not allow me to change the message. So I started over and over just to see if I could get it to work. Yet as a confirmation that it was hearing me I would ask things like, "What is the second derivative of x^3+x^2+3x+9" and it would give me the correct answer.
Then after the map program nearly continuously putting me blocks from where I really am and thus giving me terrible directions in critical situations and then trying android's siri awesome equivelant, I switched to android.
On this note, I don't think that apple realizes how bad these missteps are getting. The fact that it took me 20 minutes to send no messages, the fact that it took me 20 minutes to remove that U2 bullshit from my phone, the fact that I can't remove BS apps from my phone, the fact that iTunes nearly always is jumping to music and movies (both on the phone and the desktop) when I am clearly not looking for either (such as when I am looking for a podcast). The fact that my mac pro(not macbook but my $6,000 dollar mac pro) is shoving iCloud down my throat. The fact that I can't repair half of this shit without using magic tools. The fact that little things like some extra memory costs about as much as a cheap version of the same device. All totals up to my typing this on a completely kick ass windows desktop that is presently charging my completely kick ass huge screened Android phone that I rooted and easily removed all the BS from.
While I am seemingly a single customer, I am also in charge of the purchasing for a large company. A company where I switched many of the execs and programmers to Apple. A switch that I am now reversing. Do I hate apple? Nope. The key is that Apple is no longer working for me, the devices that I bought weren't my servants, but little apple salesmen. Then there are things like XCode that was no longer really encouraging me to do things as a professional programmer, but trying to lock me into the apple ecosystem. Oddly enough this is why I originally left windows and microsoft. It was all about
Can you imagine a carpenter who got a hammer that would only hammer mastercraft nails? Or a hammer that regularly missed the nail regardless of your skill with a hammer?
Moving the switch on the clock radio two clicks to the right works as well.
Or setting the alarm on your phone earlier in the day when you had your glasses on and weren't concerned about Melatonin.