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DeepSpeech Is Discontinued (2020)

(github.com)
49 points LorenDB | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 17:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.674s | source
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dabinat ◴[25 Jun 25 17:55 UTC] No.44380059[source]▶
It was discontinued 5 years ago - I’m not sure why it took so long to archive the repo.

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/future-of-deepspeech-stt-aft...

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echelon ◴[25 Jun 25 20:35 UTC] No.44381578[source]▶
My personal little conspiracy theory is that Google pays Mozilla as an antitrust shield.

A lot of us pretty much assume that much, but I think it goes much deeper.

I think Google pays and maintains a working relationship with the CEO of Mozilla (current and former) to purposely keep the organization rudderless, uncompetitive, and shrinking.

Mozilla spends its money building a 3D VR metaverse here, a bunch of AI models it later scraps over there, a web3 / distributed social program, etc. It scraps Rust, doesn't invest into Firefox. Just silly toys and experiments.

That nice CEO salary is hush money.

Just a fun little pet theory, totally not based on evidence.

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nopelynopington ◴[26 Jun 25 07:21 UTC] No.44385024[source]▶
Firefox is already an excellent and fast browser and people just don't use it. I think it's a marketing problem. Google, Microsoft, Brave, etc all put a lot of money and resources into promoting their browsers, pushing them at an OS level (with legal care), using ads etc. For Firefox to compete they'd need to spend a lot more of their money marketing and end up building far fewer fun toys and experiments, and they could still never achieve the same level as MS or Google.

I think I'd rather they keep innovating

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toss1 ◴[26 Jun 25 14:28 UTC] No.44387794[source]▶
>>I think I'd rather they keep innovating

Yes, but innovating and then killing the innovations, e.g., most recently Pocket, is not really innovating in any useful sense. When something like Pocket starts getting traction then gets killed for no apparent reason, it does seem like more circumstantial evidence to support the above thesis that Google is paying Mozilla just as an increasingly weak anti-trust shield

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1. nopelynopington ◴[26 Jun 25 20:33 UTC] No.44391031[source]▶
Was pocket getting traction? It's been around since 2007 and Wikipedia says it had 17 million users in 2015. In an internet of billions of users that's not many.

Google have often killed innovative and popular products (reader, picasa, chromecast, stadia, panoramio) but I doubt anyone would believe that's it's evidence of some kind of infiltrator sabotaging the company.

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2. toss1 ◴[01 Jul 25 14:07 UTC] No.44434053[source]▶
I wouldn't measure traction merely by counts of occasional users — which measures only lowest common denominator.

Much more important is quantity and quality of use by those do make it a part of their personal or work lives — measuring 'stickiness'.

Having many users who can and will stop using your product for trivial reasons is far less good than having fewer users who will stick with your product, and find it a positive value, and will stick with your ecosystem and encourage others to do so.

And yes, with Google, I actively avoid using their products specifically because no matter how useful they make those products, Google has a well-established habit of killing them for no apparent reason or timing. It'd be one thing if the products could be used local-stand-alone as long as I wanted, but when it's just killing the cloud where it all runs, it is just nearly guaranteeing a future waste of my time to re-find another solution.

I didn't think I had that risk with Firefox/Mozilla, but evidently I do, and that is just another reason now to start searching for a new browser...