SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Google has long been focused on artificial intelligence. Its Google Now and voice assistance projects have used AI to better the lives of users. The Google Home voice-based hardware unit brings its assistant to life, making traditional inputs and displays unnecessary. With just the power of your voice, you can interact with the device -- nothing else is needed.
The search giant has decided to take artificial intelligence to the maker community with a new initiative called AIY. This initiative (found here) will introduce open source AI projects to the public that makers can leverage in a simple way. Today, Google announces the first-ever AIY project. Called "Voice Kit," it is designed to work with a Raspberry Pi to create a voice-based virtual assistant. Please keep in mind that the Pi itself is not included, so you must bring your own. For this project, you can use a Pi 3 Model B, Pi 2, or Pi Zero. Want a Voice Kit? Here's how to get it. Heck, you might be getting one for free and you don't even know it.
Source: https://betanews.com/2017/05/04/google-open-source-raspberry-pi-diy-voice-kit/
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 08 2017, @08:54PM (1 child)
virtual assistant ... voice recognition ... AI
I've been playing with that kind of equipment as a hobby for many years and I'm not sure those three words appear together outside marketing.
My misterhouse and more recently openhab as a virtual assistant is very "victorian era servant seen and not heard" type of thing where there's a lot of if-then and cascaded and astronomically aware timers and alarms gone wild. But it doesn't "do" anything other than make my live better by doing a more disciplined job that I would do myself if I were not so lazy. I do have perhaps the most barque and bizarre super-smart thermostat ever seen.
My voice experience is Alexa actually does rock at telling me what time it is, or as a verbal jukebox, or timers and alarms I can set, but she's pretty useless otherwise. Integrating her with misterhouse involved a java app that pretended to be a hue lightbulb hub, and integrating her with my new openhab is apparently more complex. Eventually I'll be able to turn lights on and off by voice and stuff like that.
There's no AI involved in any of it.
I will say that comparing misterhouse and openhab, 20 years ago you got weird looking perl, and today you get total WTF DSLs for every little task just total WTF also python and java. The new stuff is not better than misterhouse, but the java interface supports more stuff, mostly kinda sorta.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 08 2017, @09:16PM
I have tried Alexa and I'm also not impressed. It's good at... playing radio stations (but the IP radio will cut out often compared to an FM receiver).
Kudos on finding Alexa's "backdoor entry".
I used the generic term "AI". Real life sentient/sapient machine brain slavery earns the upgraded term "strong AI". Regular AI could mean a lot of things. It could mean that the Alexa/Siri of 2022 does a lot better than the current version, but falls decades short of being JARVIS "strong". As it is cloud-based, you *may* not need to buy new equipment to enjoy "smarter" performance. There's a version history for it somewhere.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]