DeepSpeech Is Discontinued (2020)

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...

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.

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

>>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