SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 fubari on Sunday September 25 2016, @07:21PM
Quote: "It takes around five years to train a PhD student, and five years ago there weren’t that many PhD students starting a career in deep learning. What this means now is that those few that there are are being prized very highly." (from Why Google Is Investing In Deep Learning [fastcompany.com]).
Asking for "open source advanced voice recognition" is like asking for...
"open source trans-pacific fiber cables"
"open source space shuttle"
"open source open heart surgery"
All of those things, including "state of the art voice recognition", require a some non-trivial infrastructure and rather deep human expertise.
Consider the experts that build things like today's state-of-the-art voice recognition system.
Where are you going to find them? I mean the mathematicians, linguists, neuroscientists and programmers that can do these sorts of things? (my guess would be Google, Baidu, Apple, Microsoft Research and maybe some universities).
You need lots of processing power.
You need lots of human brain power.
What part of this fits "open source" ?
But hey, if you can do it, Awesome :-) I wish you the best of luck.
I suppose you could start here... some of the listed projects are open source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_projects [wikipedia.org]
Good luck. Let us know how it goes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @09:25PM
So what you're saying is open source AI, like every other cool technology, is just five years away from market? WooHoo!