Title is misleading, they're not bringing the speech engine to everyone, you still have to pay for Google cloud API requests. They're merely open sourcing the Android app that calls out to the API. See the GitHub link in the article: https://github.com/google/live-transcribe-speech-engine/blob...
That's disappointing, the one exciting feature on the Pixel 4 is its offline transcription feature. From the headline I figured that's what this was about.
Google published research papers on offline recognition, the feature is shipping on Android phones (i.e. one can inspect a working device), there is an active OSS community for TensorFlow and lots of public work on speech recognition. Many building blocks are public for motivated researchers.
Ugh. Was so happy to read this title, thought I could finally stop work on reverse engineering the app's offline tflite engine. I guess this is motivation to pick that project. Back up