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by t_fatus 3043 days ago
I really love the idea of an off-line voice assistant, however most of my tech friends in France and I feel that Snips (which is very visible on the press here) still has to deliver something tangible (). This might be the first time I want to try one of their product though.

they had announced a keyboard app for iOS and Android which did seemingly the same thing as the swipe keyboard.
1 comments
altharaz 3042 days ago
I agree.

Their IA assistant seems really interesting, and I would really love to give it a try, but I don't want to invest energy if there is a high risk that the service shuts down soon.

I remember the Tranquilien app [0], which was also developed by Snips. There was a lot of media talking about it, but it has been quickly stopped :(.

[0] https://www.digital.sncf.com/store/applications/tranquilien-...

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albi_lander 3042 days ago
Actually the good thing is that if Snips disappears, you will still be able to run your snips assistant as everything runs locally.
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StavrosK 3042 days ago
Yeah, but that's until some library makes a backwards-incompatible change and the whole things stops building. Sure, it's better than a completely proprietary service, but support and active maintenance are very important too.
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Yoric 3042 days ago
The Rust ecosystem and build system, is designed to prevent this. If you're using a library and want to code to keep compiling in 10 years, you can (and should) just lock the dependencies.

Since the libraries are all mirrored on crates.io and, by design, cannot be removed once they are published, you should be good, at least until the day the owners of crates.io stop being able to pay the server costs.

I believe that you can also host local mirrors, but I haven't checked that.

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__bee 3042 days ago
I think that they shifted dramatically from experimenting around `smart cities` to be an AI Startup focusing on building voice assistants.

On Techcrunch [0] > The team didn’t have a product or business model in mind. It experimented for a while, launching projects around smart cities, such as Tranquilien, a service that predicts how busy your train is going to be, or a smart empty parking spot prediction service.``

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/26/snips-grabs-6-3-million-to...

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/snips-2

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