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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?
Does anyone actually know a programmer who want such a thing? As a developer who has never used this feature on his phone, I'm not very inspired to contribute to such a project. I'd be much more likely to work on projects that help improve security and isolation and specially break such services.
When you talk about the 'massive farm of GPUs' running 24/7 you ignore the fact that, because it is proprietary they are missing out on the potential compute resources out there.
How many people have run SETI@home, or gene folding efforts. We just need someone insightful and ingenious to find a way to deal with machine learning in an 'offline' way, and be able to present the user interface in a quick fashion.
It would have to start out very dumb, but with some great key algorithms I expect an open source option could move a lot faster than anything out there in this regard.
There are a few application areas that are specialized and difficult enough that it they may not be doable within the Free Software paradigm. Richard Stallman himself, for instance, was not able to explain to me how you could get the right specialized engineers together to develop a free equivalent to Synopsys design compiler. Enthusiasts in this area don’t tend to be interested in writing software as a hobby, so you’d have to hire engineers, which means you have to pay for all the development.
With automatic speech recognition, it’s not just an AI problem. You need massive labeled datasets that cost money to acquire, and the experts who really know this stuff are moving to on to their next research project. So how are you going to get engineers to learn and implement the esoteric techniques used here? You’d have to pay them. Most people who would be interested in writing free software to do this just don’t know the subject area well enough.
You pay for Android with allowing Google to data mine your info. This is why they wanted to be on mobile phones in the first place. This is why they offer "free" services like Gmail and photos. Their software reads all your emails. Then they target ads to you. Google Now is another way they can get advertising info from you. That's how Google makes their income, and why they can give Android away for "free" to phone makers. It's not about being open source. It's about advertising revenue.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
The thing is, this really is not an open source software issue, it is more of an infrastrcuture issue. People can make the code that will handle spoken queries and return answers and do it as a community. That's not really the tricky part. What the OP is looking for though is a massive project of which code is a small part. There is voice processing, servers to maintain, lots of fine-tuning and learning to do, if we want the assistent to speak then we need voice actors, etc. Plus hours and hours of testing and trials and putting it all in an interface people will like.
This reminds me of the "Where is the open source Facebook?" question. There are plenty of open source social network frameworks, but the code is a small part of the job. There's a massive amount of servers, advertising and social engagement that would need to happen for someone to make a new Facebook alternative. The open source code is there, it's the other parts which are missing.
The author also seems to think most commercial software up to this point has an open equvalent, but it doesn't. Geological, accounting, mapping and tax software tends to be commercial only. There are usually no open source alternatives because it's not something you can throw together and just publish on-line. You need auditors and geologists, accountants and so on to make these things work. It's not a coding problem so much as a business/product problem.
I personally don't like to use voice assistants, mainly for privacy reasons. And no, I don't particularly care if Google or Apple knows what I'm searching for. Rather, I don't particularly like when people I'm sitting near know what my immediate intentions are. I'm not doing anything nefarious, I just like keeping my personal business personal, which is much easier with Swype.
It's pointless to talk about creating an open-source version of Siri or Alexa unless you can explain how you're going to also create and maintain the server-side infrastructure needed to make it work. The Siri and Alexa interfaces may run on a client, but they're brain-dead without the server farms of Apple and Amazon behind them.
A similar example from the not-too-distant past: Aaron Swartz's download of a significant chunk of the JSTOR database. Those JSTOR articles wanted to be free, right? And they were set free - copies of Swartz's JSTOR download were available in a multi-GB torrent on several sites. Swartz's entire rationale was that those articles should be freely available to everyone.
So where is the free, open-source version of JSTOR today? It doesn't exist, because building and maintaining a server-side infrastructure that makes that database useable costs money ... which, of course, is why JSTOR required a subscription fee.
Solve out the server-side economics, and you have a shot at building an open-source Siri. Until then, you're better off putting your open-source efforts into client-side applications.
Nonsense. There would be enormous use of fully open source alternatives to Google search, Gmail, Call of Duty, Starcraft 2, Destiny, and dozens of other similar projects. The best, to my knowledge, fully open source search engine is Yacy and it totally sucks. Running your own email server isn't too hard, but getting your mail to recipients on Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo mail without relaying through one of the big services is all but impossible. There are plenty of nice graphical fully open source video games out there, but nothing with the artwork or the voice acting or the visuals on par with a top of the line AAA game.
Nobody is making them because it's too damn difficult.