The era of open voice assistants

Not super convinced the XMOS audio processing chip is really gonna buy a lot. Trying to do audio input processing feels like a dynamic task, requiring such adaption. XMOS is the most well known audio processor and a beast, but not sure it's really gonna help here!

I really hope we see some open-source machine -learned systems emerge.

I saw Insta360 announce their video conferencing solution today. Optics looks pretty medium, nothing wild, but Insta360 is so good at video that I expect it'll be great. But there's a huge 14 microphone array on it, and that's the hard job; figuring out how to get good audio from speakers in a variety of locations around a room. It really made me wish for more open source footing here, some promising start, be it the conference room or open living space. I've given all of 60s to look through this, and was kinda hopeful because heck yeah Home Assistant, but my initial read isn't super promising, isn't that this is starting the proper software base needed to listen well to the world.

https://petapixel.com/2024/12/17/the-insta360-connect-is-a-2...

They showed a video at the end of their broadcast last night comparing what the raw microphone hears and what comes out of the XMOS chip and you can hear a much clearer voice all the time even when there is noise or you are far away from the device. It is also used to cancel out the music if you are using it's speaker output. I don't think it's doing any voice processing but it's cleaning up the audio a lot which makes the job of the wake word processor and the speach to text a lot easier. Up until now this was missing from a lot of the home made voice assistance and I think why Alexa can understand you from the next room but my home made one struggles with all but quiet conditions.