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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?
Sirius (Ubuntu only I believe):
http://sirius.clarity-lab.org/sirius/
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.
First, I'm sure there's lots of Open Source being used in Google's implementation - just not where we can see.
There is a speech recognizer from CMU that might be a good starting point. I haven't heard about plain-language software, though. There is additional rocket science to be done. Not insurmountable given things we've already done.
Training with millions of people? Actually, that's the part that community development is good at.
Bruce Perens.
OK, you might not listen to the Linux Action Show or similar podcasts, but come on... google "open source AI" before asking.
It is in development..
http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/
Not affiliated with the project.. saw it sometime ago.. decided to wait till it further matures...
This was the kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... Their main community website is: https://community.mycroft.ai/ They also have a slack here: https://mycroftai.slack.com/me...
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.
Ones that even beat the proprietary competitors too, see http://tests.stockfishchess.or.... This is not to mention efforts like folding@home and similar. Of course there is still the problem of having large training data sets.
The Mozilla project Vaani is intended to fill exactly this niche. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Vaani
It's semantic recognition. Like what "it" in the prior sentence means -- in this case it's mainly a grammatical placeholder, but note how the various uses of "it" in *this* sentence are different.
The really impressive thing about Siri is how well (although still not human-well) it divines intent, not just phonemes. Add to that a massive scale attempt to get the phonetic recognition part right, and it's a bit like trying to launch a competitor to Google Maps.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not yet mentioned yet is http://lucida.ai/ -- it's the successor to Sirius, and where all the ongoing development is focused.
Major options that are mentioned elsewhere in the thread:
https://mycroft.ai/ (One of the most advanced,can actually be used in a pretty useful manner now, but sends snippets to Google for voice recognition--they intend to change that eventually, and they don't have a full-time open mic. Plus they aggregate audio across users so it's less identifiable as from a single source).
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Vaani (from the Mozilla project; supposed to enter beta this month according to that page)
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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
Open Source Siri always responds with 'RTFM, noob'. Should be pretty easy.
Yes, this joke has been brought to you by the year 2005.
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.
Search for aliens -- OoooOOOooooh!
Sex robot -- Giggity!
Create a digital assistant -- Meh.
Siri and Google Now aren't sexy. Maybe what's needed is a chatty digital alien sexbot that happens to double as an assistant. Slide in the useful features on the sly, like hiding dog medicine in a piece of cheese.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
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.
Siri is a complete stack of text reco engines, intent recognition tools, and backends. There are many initiatives like Sirius, Mycroft and YodaQA, and each does something slightly different - either focusing on the speech reco infrastructure, or just answering factoid questions...
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
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?
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.
timholman's post is incredibly insightful. To get around the problem he point out, I think we need to distribute these services to the community, as the OP suggests. The TelCo's make this difficult, with restrictive terms of service. A cloud powered by millions of home users is probably the technical solution to the economic problem, but to implement it we'll need to free the fibre.
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.
The answer is MyCroft
I plan on buying one of these the very soonest I can once they are actually shipping the hardware. Echo is crippled by the many limitations Amazon coded in on purpose -- it's basically something that looks up text matches and does something if it finds one. No language parsing worth a damn. Even so, it's very useful, and within those limits, you can make stuff for it, Amazon's pretty open about it as long as you can set up a secure server (ugh) or use their cloud (double-ugh.) Siri, as per usual for Apple, is a much more closed system, and frankly, it's of no interest at all to me because of that.
Mycroft is completely open source. I have very high hopes for it because of that. I have reams of my own natural language processing code I should be able to plug right in the moment there is a speech-to-text engine I can use directly. Others do as well. Custom apps in the home space, that are actually somewhat smarter than...
[if string == "turn on light" then TurnOnLight]
I suggest everyone check MyCroft out. Perhaps you'll be as enthused as I. I can hope. ;)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Because he was not trained enough with a massive farm of GPUs running 24/7? :D
Do you drive? Because I do, and it's handy as hell. Read/write messages without removing your hands from the steering wheel, or make calls or prettt much anything you want.
there are many situations in which is very handy to use a phone/computer with your voice, and some have saved lives.
Well then you are an idiot!
When I am driving, I concentrate on Driving, not " Read/write messages" or "make calls or prettt much anything you want"
Driving a vehicle requires 100% attention to the task, and anyone who thinks differently is a fool!
Turn the phone off when driving please before you kill someone! ( I do not care if you kill yourself though)