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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: 2) by mcgrew on Monday September 26 2016, @04:14PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Monday September 26 2016, @04:14PM (#406686) Homepage Journal

    I wrote it back in 1984 and had versions for the TS-1000, TRS-80MC10, Apple IIe, and later DOS. I'm sure I've lost the code, though. The US Copyright Office might still have it.

    But considering that almost all supercomputers are running Linux these days, Siri et al are probably running on top of GNU.

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