[echelon]

I'm not sure about Mozilla's efforts in STT, but they were lagging pretty far in TTS. [1]

Google/Baidu, universities, and an assortment of Chinese/Japanese/Korean social media companies (Line, etc.) are posting the most compelling TTS research, models, and code. Mozilla's TTS system [2] is an amalgam of some of these models, but it lags pretty far behind state of the art.

Mozilla should focus on getting additional revenue streams. We can help them out by trying to get Congress / DOJ to strip Google of its ability to have and maintain a browser with which they entrench their search and advertising moat. I think they're clearly in antitrust/anticompetitive territory.

[1] I'm pretty familiar with this field as I wrote https://vo.codes and https://trumped.com TTS systems. Neither of those are state of the art in terms of mean opinion score (MOS), but they're incredibly efficient.

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

[nshm]

It is explainable given that there was a single developer working on TTS. It is hard to compete with big academic teams/industry players this way.

I also believe Mozilla team was restricted by a lack of computing resources. They had just a single 8GPU server or so.

[posguy]

Said 8 GPU server was consistently in use for Mozilla DeepSpeech (now renamed Mozilla STT) in training models. Its impressive how far Mozilla got considering how limited their resources were.

[qchris]

This is an area that I find unbelievably frustrating. A lack of computing resources in the current day is kind of insane. You can buy an 8GB GPU for <$1000. Even with the rest of the costs, the cost of hardware like this is a drop in the bucket when your main office is housed in Mountain View! Especially on a project that ends up being public-facing, these are missed opportunities where a little can go a long way.

[nmstoker]

I take your point but according to the release details on the repo it was not 8Gb on one card but a server with 8 cards, each a Quadro RTX 6000 with 24Gb, and they're around £4k each currently, so the cost of the GPUs alone is £32k

https://github.com/mozilla/STT/releases/tag/v0.8.2

[qchris]

Ah, I see-- not an 8GB, 1-GPU server, but an 8-GPU server. That does make a bit of a difference, changing the cost from a new workstation to functionally a piece of capital equipment. Still, I'm not sure that my point about equipment costs falls short--even at (call it) $40K, you're probably talking less than 3 months of the company's all-in cost for the developer themself, amortized over multiple years.

[panpanna]

We need a SETI@home approach to open source AI models.

Only then we can break our dependency on Google and Facebook - and Mozilla for that matter.

[nshm]

It is going on, see https://github.com/learning-at-home/hivemind and https://github.com/bytedance/fedlearner

[chromedev]

Chromium is open source and you can apply policies to do the things you mention. Based on your logic Mozilla should also be forced to get rid of Firefox Sync.

[echelon]

Chrome is shoved down grandma's throat. She probably doesn't know much other than it's the "Google Internet thing". It's the default on Android and Google.com nags you to install it.

This is worrying given that Google cripples the browser and web standards to favor its own search engine and advertising platform.

Killed the semantic web and semantic markup? Check.

Disabled APIs for blocking ads? Check.

Use Google.com as the default search? Yep.

Embrace and extend the web with AMP and instant apps? Bingo.

Auto log into your Google session or nag until users permit it? Absolutely.

Trying to destroy the notion of a URL? I thought those were cool.

Google is destroying the web and is about as anti-competitive as they come.

[chromedev]

> Killed the semantic web and semantic markup? Check.

Based on what evidence?

> Disabled APIs for blocking ads? Check

They didn't. uBlock Origin and adblocker extensions never stopped working.

> Use Google.com as the default search? Yep.

What do you think Edge does here? Easily changed via policies.

> Auto log into your Google session or nag until users permit it? Absolutely

Doesn't nag you and easily disabled in settings or via policy.

> Trying to destroy the notion of a URL? I thought those were cool.

I only get a little frustrated on Android, but just have to remember to hit the edit icon if I want to change it.

[sjagoe]

> > Disabled APIs for blocking ads? Check

> They didn't. uBlock Origin and adblocker extensions never stopped working.

That was probably this issue in the chromium tracker https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897...

I don't know what happened after that though; the conclusion of that issue (in Jan 2019) was "these changes are draft, and still being discussed".