Any plans on Purism partnering with Mycroft or another open source AI alternative?
Would be nice to have a Siri like alternative where your voice quires are not stored or if they were encrypted somehow.
1 Like
My concern is that the voice queries are transmitted over the internet to a random server. That by itself is bad enough, regardless of whether the query is stored anywhere.
2 Likes
It seems work without network, however that company still let you sign up and use their online services without any suggestions that the package can work without their services. It doesnt taste good.
it’s not the voice assistants that are a problem - the problem is the proprietary nature of that software and the centralised infrastructure of the www.
3 Likes
My concern is that the voice queries are transmitted over the internet to a random server. That by itself is bad enough, regardless of whether the query is stored anywhere.
Personally, I’d prefer the process of translating speech-to-text on my device and then check if it is an actual Mycroft command on the device. Only then can it send data to another server.
This should work well, most commands don’t even need to interact with other servers like speech-to-text and opening apps. The command list shouldn’t take up to much space.
What commands do need external data is generally looking stuff up on the web (which can be done fairly anonymously with Jive Search) or looking up something on Wikipedia (which can be self-hosted).
it’s not the voice assistants that are a problem - the problem is the proprietary nature of that software and the centralised infrastructure of the www.
Mycroft is what I like to call “potentially free’d” there hardware is basically a Raspberry Pi and requires non-free code to even boot! The again, we are talking about the software portions so…idk.
1 Like
Calling it a “plan” would be a stretch 
But it is for sure on our radar. ATM we have our hands full to cover the most basic things and to create a usable platform. Once we launched the phone we will revisit further application opportunities.
Cheers
nicole
6 Likes
They’ve released their backend (I think in full) as opensource now, so it might be “more possible” now to partner with them.
2 Likes
If I’m reading this right the offline thingy (PocketSphinx) is only for wake detection, actual STT is using google. So no, thanks.
I’ve been grinding this topic for quite a bit while implementing OpenSource manager with STT for pebble. And unfortunately i didn’t manage to find offline engine producing good enough results with generic settings (no training). There are free engines but they are still online and proprietary.
3 Likes
There is an Offline but not completely open source alternative for voice assistants which seems to be able to run on the Librem 5 itself, without any Cloud based STT, called snips.ai.
Unfortunately I haven’t had the time time to try it on my Librem 5 dev kit.
If anyone wants to try it the Documentation with an example running on the raspberry pi can be found at https://docs.snips.ai/getting-started
AFAIK the only thing that is not open source is the actual STT application with the trained neural net.
The following handling of the Output with the Natural language understanding seems to be open source https://github.com/snipsco/snips-nlu
EDIT: typos and wording
2 Likes