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by e12e 3366 days ago
Looks very interesting. I guess I might be fighting a loosing battle here - but any plans for an offline solution? This is the kind of thing that I'd probably love to use on the train (many tunnels, no 4g/spotty in-train wireless) - and on flights (wifi is comming, but not always) -- or other places without good network coverage (composing a blog post on a hike..).
1 comments
ncantelmo 3366 days ago
Yeah, I understand, it's a completely valid use case. I'm personally much more productive when I'm completely disconnected, so I really identify with the request.

I had, in the past, also been thinking a bit about how the system could work offline because it would avoid a lot of security issues for something like a medical office that wants to create content that's then copied into a medical records system.

My initial thought was to bundle a local copy of the server with pre-trained models, but that becomes problematic on mobile clients. I'm writing the server in Go, so if I go that route I'd probably need to reimplement parts of it in another language and avoid using any remote APIs.

So the answer is: very likely yes, but not initially. You've definitely moved the functionality up my planned features list.

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e12e 3366 days ago
A self-contained binary would work fine for me (If it could run on a Surface Pro 4 - or as a VM image - eg. hyper-v and/or virtual box).

I always prefer a Free software/open source solution - but I'm not sure how you'd monetize that. Maybe charge for the app (ios/android) - and provide a free/open self-host server solution, along with a subscription service and a web client? (The payment for the app would also grant access to the subscription, and for those that didn't want to self-host/wanted to support the project could pay for the subscription and use the web SaaS solution?).

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ncantelmo 3366 days ago
The plan is to offer a subscription service even if there's an offline component. For a bunch of reasons, it's the best approach for a one-person venture trying to get off the ground.

I've been an OSS user and supporter for a long time. I don't think I'll be open sourcing the core system anytime soon, but I'm very likely to release any useful NLP or ML-related libraries that are created as part of this project. Not sure what those will be or when they'll be ready, but I do have a mind to give back to the OSS community.

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e12e 3365 days ago
I understand. Fwiw I recently had a look at "cyberduck" again - they do a gpl+free(nag) binary+sale through windows/Apple appstore:

https://cyberduck.io/

Not sure what kind of income they see, though.

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