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Plasma Bigscreen Is A New Smart TV Experience Powered By Raspberry Pi 4 And KDE
Want to turn your dumb TV into a smart one? Or maybe you'd prefer to have a more privacy respecting, open source operating system powering your TV experience? Just take one part KDE Plasma, one part Rasbperry Pi 4, and one part Mycroft AI voice assistant, and you've got Plasma Bigscreen. It's a new venture that transforms the KDE Linux desktop into a "10 foot experience" using the speed and flexibility of KDE Neon, complete with voice control and Alexa-like assistant skills.
Smart TVs are becoming more and more complete computers, but unfortunately there the experience tends to be a tight walled garden between proprietary platform, services and privacy-infringing features. Features which are very cool, like voice control, but in order to not pose a threat to the user privacy should be on a free software stack and depending less on proprietary cloud platforms where possible. -- Plasma Bigscreen developer Marco Marin
Plasma Bigscreen is just entering Beta, and is currently available to download and install on the Raspberry Pi 4. On paper, it looks incredible promising for a few reasons:
Other features include: Privacy-focused (i.e., locally-processed) voice control as well as free (as in beer and as in libre) open source software that can be controlled with a remote or mouse/keyboard. Further, security updates are more likely to be created and made available with a popular operating system and browser.
If it is truly controllable by the user, then it could be turned into a "dumb" TV which would be deprived of some advertising.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Monday March 30 2020, @04:17AM (1 child)
I came to check on just this. I had read previously that KDE used the same STT as mycro, but I didn't see the claim that it was "locally-processed" until now. I was curious if that meant that Mycroft final implemented an implemented a form of "in house" STT.
They (Mycroft) say they intend to provide a "local server" you could set up in your house to replace Mycroft's current dependencies on cloud services. Their failure to do this yet is why I do not consider Mycroft any less of a home surveillance system than Alexa or any of the other listen devices on the market. The potential is there. I was hoping they finally implemented it and just didn't get any press until now.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Monday March 30 2020, @05:09AM
Just to follow up, work has progressed since I last looked. There appears to be an implementation in active development, but it's not complete yet.
As seen here https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/about-mycroft-ai/faq [gitbook.io]
Based on what I've seen this may be dated and setting expectations a little lower that reality. In any case, there has been real progress.
https://github.com/MycroftAI/personal-backend [github.com]