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?
Bruce Perens. The guy who sold out to HP and spent his time crapping on Microsoft. You know Microsoft has more developers being paid by Microsoft to do opensource than you ever had. And look at Azure. The one thing between true evil, Jeff Bezos, and his thievery known as AWS is Azure at this point.
Amazing how much people can spout about something about which they know nothing. Bruce is only conflicted because he never bothered to learn anything about MAPI, Exchange, Outlook, etc. Same with this Intel employee claiming he canâ(TM)t use his Exchange calendar from Linux. I use my calendar on MS Exchange from Linux all the time, and all I need is Netscape 4.75. This doesnâ(TM)t take any special add-ons, it comes with Exchange. And *everything* in the Exchange store is accessible through HTTP/WebDAV from any platform, the web store uses standard METHOD=GET HTTP requests to get at any item in the Exchange database, Exchange does SMTP, POP3, and practically every other open standard you want. If you insist on using MAPI, itâ(TM)s not as if the protocol isnâ(TM)t documented; I wrote my own MAPI drivers simply from reading online documentation before. But today I would use WebDAV anyway â" XML and HTTP werenâ(TM)t around when MAPI was first being created, but they are now, and you can do anything you can do with MAPI using XML and HTTP instead now. Honestly, all of the documents on this stuff are up on the MSDN site with piles of documentation, so I canâ(TM)t see how everyone is acting like it is so hard. Maybe Bruce needs to fix his own vision and look at whatâ(TM)s right under his nose before pretending like he has any expertise to fix HPâ(TM)s vision
I think Bruce here also liked the horrible GPLv3 which has done more to slow things down than anything else.
And now we live in a world where Google's opensource android has been weaponized against the users so opensource merely delayed dystopia by a short while but free and open has been used mainly to deny developers pay more than anything else.
There is only one Bruce for my heart and that is Bruce Vilanch.