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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/
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
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.
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.