I have to admit, voice assistants don't interest me much, but this looks like a pretty cool start to something that seems to be needed and lacking in the realm of voice assistants.
I'd like to see this gain traction and grow. Just because of the amount of people that seem to use and like voice assistants it's great to see some work on the open source, non-proprietary cloud side of things.
I also have to admit, I find most of thr current voice assistant technology vaguely creepy knowing every command is possibly stored and saved somewhere outside my control. The fact the systems that do this are constantly listening for phrases and of course the inevitable use of your data for marketing that these services are based on.
I understand the choices seem to be either pay for it or pay with your privacy and data, but I still hold out the naive hope for a technology based future focused on empowering individuals and not service providers and large corporations, sadly it seems this mostly comes from the open source world, which as many articles on hn have touched on, don't tend to get the support they need or they get picked up by large entities who take what they need and surround them by proprietary blobs.
Sorry this got a bit rambling, but anyway, this is a cool project, I hope to see it grow and gain support and adoption.
>I understand the choices seem to be either pay for it or pay with your privacy and data
Where have you seen those choices? What I've seen is either pay with your privacy and data (Cortana for example) or pay for it and at the same time surrender your privacy and data (Alexa, Google Nest).
I think you'd rather say that Apple will dress themselves up to look like what their audience wants to see - that they don't really care about privacy, but more the perception that you have it. Their actions in China back this view up. You see, the expectation in the West is that you make sure you look like you're doing the "right thing", but behind the scenes you accommodate state actors doing what they want with your data.
I was actually in the same opinion as you about remote storage and always on wake detection, and I actually found out that it's possible to make one without all of this!
There are "offline wake work detector libraries" like Snowboy.ai that prevent one of those things, and you can also get self hosted versions of even popular language parsers like the Azure Speech Recognition that you can run in a docker image and have everything stored locally (or not at all!)
Not suggesting you have to go make your own. It just makes me hopeful for the future where we can build useful assistants that don't need all this privacy l-destroying crap in them :)
I wish somebody made a text-based assistant that has similar functionality. As a non-native English speaker I don't think voice assistants will ever become accurate enough to be usable by me.
I use voice2json on my homebrew RPi voice rig, and it has a plain-text input mode [0]. With a little Node-RED + MQTT + shell magic, it's pretty neat/convenient to type into the terminal: `house "turn on lamp"`. :)
Dexter has a couple of different input systems: PocketSphinx and DeepSpeech.
PocketSphinx seems to have better language coverage but lower accuracy than DeepSpeech, which only has English and Mandarin Chinese.
DeepSpeech was not great about 2 years ago when I first started Dexter and, being a Brit, I had to fake an (awful) American accent to make it work. It's come on well in that time though; I can use my own voice now, which is a relief to those near by. No clue how good its Mandarin recognition is however.
Other folks in surrounding threads have flagged Kaldi which I'll try to take a look at as well (though it also looks to be only English and Mandarin too).
It was mainly a toy project for me; a bone to chew on if you will. I wanted something which I could mess with easily myself and which was heavily pluggable.
Integrating it with various external peripherals should be easy and it's designed to run completely on its own (i.e. no cloud for a lot of things).
I added a "Related work" section to the README. It's a tad vacuous since, really, these things are all pretty similar. Dexter can do things with swirly lights though. Swirly lights are cool.
Cool project!
Is the name perhaps inspired by either:
1) The kids cartoon scientist with a lab, or
2) The Miami homicide bloodsplatter specialist moonlighting renegade serial killer?
I'd like to see this gain traction and grow. Just because of the amount of people that seem to use and like voice assistants it's great to see some work on the open source, non-proprietary cloud side of things.
I also have to admit, I find most of thr current voice assistant technology vaguely creepy knowing every command is possibly stored and saved somewhere outside my control. The fact the systems that do this are constantly listening for phrases and of course the inevitable use of your data for marketing that these services are based on.
I understand the choices seem to be either pay for it or pay with your privacy and data, but I still hold out the naive hope for a technology based future focused on empowering individuals and not service providers and large corporations, sadly it seems this mostly comes from the open source world, which as many articles on hn have touched on, don't tend to get the support they need or they get picked up by large entities who take what they need and surround them by proprietary blobs.
Sorry this got a bit rambling, but anyway, this is a cool project, I hope to see it grow and gain support and adoption.