The era of open voice assistants

(www.home-assistant.io)

878 points _Microft | 1 comments | 20 Dec 24 00:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.316s | source

Show context

Jarwain ◴[20 Dec 24 04:02 UTC] No.42468180[source]▶

I'm actually really excited for this!

I noticed recently there weren't any good open source hardware projects for voice assistants with a focus on privacy. There's another project I've been thinking about where I think the privacy aspect is Important, and figuring out a good hardware stack has been a Process. The project I want to work on isn't exactly a voice assistant, but same ultimate hardware requirements

Something I'm kinda curious about: it sounds like they're planning on a sorta batch manufacturing by resellers type of model. Which I guess is pretty standard for hardware sales. But why not do a sorta "group buy" approach? I guess there's nothing stopping it from happening in conjunction

I've had an idea floating around for a site that enables group buys for open source hardware (or 3d printed items), that also acts like or integrates with github wrt forking/remixing

replies(5): >>42468413 #>>42468436 #>>42468945 #>>42469600 #>>42470457 #

Brendinooo ◴[20 Dec 24 05:01 UTC] No.42468413[source]▶

>>42468180 #

I invested in Mycroft and it flopped. Here’s hoping some others can go where they couldn’t.

replies(5): >>42468709 #>>42469160 #>>42470293 #>>42470771 #>>42473432 #

1. bronco21016 ◴[20 Dec 24 11:41 UTC] No.42470293[source]▶

>>42468413 #

I think Mycroft was unfortunately just ahead of its time. STT was just becoming good enough but NLU wasn’t quite there yet. Add in you’re up against Apple Google and Amazon who were able to add integrations like music and subsidize the crap out of their products.

I just think this time around is different. Open Whisper gives them amazing STT and LLMs can far more easily be adapted for the NLU portion. The hardware is also dirt cheap which makes it better suited to a narrow use case.

↑