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posted by martyb on Sunday September 25 2016, @05:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the Say-"What?" dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @06:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @06:55PM (#406351)

    And every time you say something oddball or insulting to alexa, that action and the date and time will go into the permanent dossier that amazon is keeping on you, your family and friends. They'll eventually start looking for why you were grouchy, correlating the data from all the other devices that track your movements and your communications as well as those of all the people around you.