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by nunofgs 2367 days ago
I too am super interested in an offline-only voice assistant but really don't want to bother with setting up a mic connected to a pi. Even tough it's not super hard, it'll never be as good as the commercially available options.

I think this project would really benefit from taking one of the excellent existing voice assistant/speakers on the market (Google home, echo dots, etc., and flashing them with some custom firmware.
2 comments
Iv 2367 days ago
> Even tough it's not super hard, it'll never be as good as the commercially available options.

Arguably, being offline and keeping your recordings off the cloud, it is already superior to commercially available options.

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vunie 2367 days ago
Exactly. I've never considered voice assistants because I don't want recordings of me or my family being used for who knows what.

I've just looked over the docs. I'll probably be playing with this very soon.

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pts_ 2367 days ago
Interestingly the storage on my phone was used up and Google Keyboard kept on crashing, so I had to use voice for one whole night.
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efreak 2366 days ago
Having run into similar problems multiple times, the solution is to clear cache on an app. If, like me, sorting your apps by storage usage never actually completes[1], browsers are a good thing to check first[2]; Unity games are a good second (those analytics pile up, even if the app is firewalled). If you're rooted, check the analytics in Chrome's private data folder, it was taking up 1.5gb on my tablet last time (not sure if this is cleared when you clear cache or not)

If the primary issue is the same as me, that you download too much crap without paying attention to available storage, just use the terminal emulator to create a 25-100mb file you can delete when necessary.

[1] storage ️ internal ️ apps [2] If you use PWAs to cache data and avoid high data bills, keep in mind that clearing browser cache clears PWA cache as well (my most-used PWAs are for hn and xkcd)

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gibolt 2367 days ago
They do wake-word processing on device. Not sure how dedicated the hardware is to make that possible, and the requirements for this seem too high for that.

Would love to have great hardware for custom tinkering though. With more development time and money behind this project, I hope it could grow into a great tool.

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anoncake 2367 days ago
You can do offline voice processing if the grammar is small enough. Recognizing commands is a lot easier than open domain dictation.
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