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A decade ago, we in the free and open-source community could build our own versions of pretty much any proprietary software system out there, and we did. Publishing, collaboration, commerce, you name it. Some apps were worse, some were better than closed alternatives, but much of it was clearly good enough to use every day.
But is this still true? For example, voice control is clearly going to be a primary way we interact with our gadgets in the future. Speaking to an Amazon Echo-like device while sitting on my couch makes a lot more sense than using a web browser. Will we ever be able to do that without going through somebody's proprietary silo like Amazon's or Apple's? Where are the free and/or open-source versions of Siri, Alexa and so forth?
The trouble, of course, is not so much the code, but in the training. The best speech recognition code isn't going to be competitive unless it has been trained with about as many millions of hours of example speech as the closed engines from Apple, Google and so forth have been. How can we do that?
[...] Who has a plan, and where can I sign up to it?
Perhaps a distributed computing project (along the lines of Folding@Home, SETI, etc.) would be a viable approach?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @05:50PM
I doubt they exist in a feasible form. I'm still waiting for https://cloud.open365.io/ [open365.io] to become a real thing that can replace Office365 or Google Docs/crap. But it's expensive to run these things. You need powerful servers that are up all the time in many geo locations.
All too often, people still think that Open Source == Zero USD (which obviously is wrong) which doens't help this either. Until people contribute hard cash to Open Source, we won't see this happen. I'm saddened by it, but here we are...
I think that is the next step Open Source needs to take: get people to donate money to the projects that are crucial, which is not the same as 'projects they like' (or their boat, car, whatever - maybe open source projects and http://www.npr.org/ [npr.org] [wait, what? No https? Really guys?] can exchange some ideas about pledge drives?)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Sunday September 25 2016, @06:12PM
The true spirit of open source died a long time ago. Originally it was created to allow people to have the freedom to modify code as they pleased. But today, open source is used as a cheap tool or foundation to build a bigger proprietary product. You will never see open source services like o365, siri, google, search, etc. But you will see open source doing all the heavy lifting for those commercial services.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @06:14PM
OP here
You speak truth. A sad truth, but truth...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @06:45AM
The ideals of a generation make little sense to the next generation.
Luckily there is a solution, GPL3.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Adamsjas on Sunday September 25 2016, @07:19PM
Quoting AC:
"I think that is the next step Open Source needs to take: get people to donate money to the projects that are crucial,".
That's probably exactly the wrong approach. Build some huge project that takes mountains of money to sustain is never going to work in the FOSS world?
What is needed is a small engine you can trust to run 24/7 on your own Linux boxes (ok, maybe Windows and cell phones too) that listens to conversations on an open mic, your own speech, speech on the TV or radio heard in the room, and can run multiple competitive recondition plug-ins simultaneously, while offering periodic training and review sessions. The whole system would be heavily audited to make sure nothing goes across the TCP stack so people could trust it to run all the time.
Part two would be some equally heavily audited recognition results, containing no actual recorded conversations (longer than two words), that would submit parameterized reco settings to all the plug-in writers that have the time, interest, and infrastructure to process them.
Neither part needs to yield any instant translations to text, and probably shouldn't, at least until it builds up some semblance of reliability. It could be strictly a spare-cycles process.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday September 25 2016, @11:46PM
I'm still waiting for https://cloud.open365.io/ [open365.io] to become a real thing that can replace Office365 or Google Docs/crap. But it's expensive to run these things. You need powerful servers that are up all the time in many geo locations.
'Cloud' = Someone else's servers.
Who do you trust with your data or your binaries (or even worse, their binaries)?
Trust Ivanova. Trust yourself. Anyone else? shoot 'em!
--JMS
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr