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from the maybe-listening-to-their-users-again dept.
Mozilla may be working on a voice-controlled browser
Mozilla may be working on a voice-controlled platform of its own. A listing for an all-hands internal meeting appeared about what seems like a new project: Scout. "With the Scout app, we start to explore browsing and consuming content with voice," it read. It's very unclear what the platform may or may not end up doing, as the meeting is focused on technical requirements for a "voice browser" that would, as a stated example, be able to read users an article about polar bears.
[...] CNET interpreted Scout to be a new voice-controlled web browser. With Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft falling over themselves refining their voice assistant technology (with Facebook not far behind), it's unsurprising that Mozilla would join the fray. Given the company's decades of web platform experience, a browser is surely simpler to implement than a new proprietary speaker. Plus, vocal navigation through a browser setup is probably easier for the average person to grasp.
So that's why they needed Common Voice.
Related: Mozilla's Common Voice Collecting French, German, and Welsh Samples, Prepping 40 More Languages
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday June 15 2018, @08:57PM (3 children)
snicker snicker they're gonna get hairy and then they're gonna go blind.
Yeah about that, God help us the only time I saw someone use voice seriously was the intern at a previous job spending 15 minutes annoying the entire department arguing with Siri about how to create an appointment for a hair cut. Put the Fing phone done and get a nice fashy buzz cut quicker than you can argue Siri into entering the appointment correctly.
What Alexa is good at, is not terribly important stuff in the kitchen like setting cooking timers / alarms, and playing music thats sometimes similar to what you asked her for. You have to be really careful or your oven timer will be 50 minutes instead of 15 minutes, but it does kinda work. She's also good at telling the time and tomorrows weather. Essentially if you don't have an older toddler or younger elementary school kid, you can talk to Alexa for a similar experience.
I can't even imagine the torture of doing something with turbotax or quickbooks using voice.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Friday June 15 2018, @09:06PM
And not to get too off topic, but its exactly the same problem with self driving cars. I'm cool with "Alexa level IQ in charge of a big wheel or kiddie tricycle" but you're asking for trouble putting a mental 3rd grader unsupervised behind the wheel of a full size sports car.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 16 2018, @11:47AM (1 child)
"Alexa, do your homework. Now!" :-)
(I wonder what Alexa would answer on that one …)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 18 2018, @06:35PM
She disturbingly good at doing elementary school kid homework, as my kids have discovered. One you go far enough in school to reach the "show your work" stage she's merely useful for checking answers.