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
Related Stories
Mozilla wants to crowdsource thousands of hours of voice recordings for an open source voice recognition engine:
The Mozilla Foundation launched "Common Voice," which is a crowdsourced initiative to build an open source data set for voice recognition applications.
Many technology companies believe that voice control will be embedded into most devices in the future. This is why Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, and others are all trying to put their own voice-controlled artificial intelligence assistants into as many devices as they can and as fast as they can, in order to gain market share before the competition.
The problem with this, according to Mozilla, is that voice controlled technologies could end up being dominated by proprietary technology and data sets, which aren't made available to startups and academics. As some large companies already benefit from billion-dollar revenues, it could later become too difficult for startups to catch up with the big players. Though[sic] Common Voice, Mozilla aims to democratize voice recognition technology.
You could use this to build (the easy part of) a personal assistant that either does not use the cloud, or does so on your terms.
Mozilla's effort to crowdsource datasets for voice recognition applications such as digital assistants has expanded to include 3 more languages, and soon many others:
Mozilla launched the first fruits of its Common Voice datasets in English back in November, a collection that contained some 500 hours of speech and constituted 400,000 recordings from 20,000 individuals. Today, Mozilla officially kick starts the process of collecting voice data for three more languages — French, German, and — a little randomly — Welsh. Another 40 tongues are currently being prepped for the data collection process, with the likes of Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Taiwan), Indonesian, Polish, and Dutch already halfway toward being ready to start crowdsourcing voice data.
[...] "We believe these interfaces shouldn't be controlled by a few companies as gatekeepers to voice-enabled services, and we want users to be understood consistently, in their own languages and accents," said Mozilla's chief innovation officer, Katharina Borchert, in a blog post.
The Common Voice project serves a purpose similar to that of other open-license projects that have emerged to counter privately owned platforms. OpenStreetMap is a good example of a similarly crowdsourced project that gives developers open and freely usable maps of the world, without the costs or restrictions of rival services such as Google Maps.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snow on Friday June 15 2018, @08:41PM (1 child)
Masturbation will never be the same. I'll have to get one of these too (kinky!):
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/03/15/this-device-gives-phone-privacy-in-public.html [foxnews.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Friday June 15 2018, @08:45PM
"No one cared who I was until I put on the mask."
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 15 2018, @08:44PM (17 children)
Let's see, there are ads that play sound, and Mozilla wants a voice-controlled browser. Can't see how this one could possibly lead to shenanigans, nope.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 15 2018, @08:46PM (4 children)
That could be averted by wearing headphones, which are pretty much always plugged into my laptop. Or by analyzing the sound. Or by running an adblocker.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 15 2018, @08:54PM (3 children)
We're talking about the average user here, not people like us.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday June 15 2018, @09:01PM
Sorta-normies rick-rolled my Alexa on me, which was at least kinda funny. That's how old Alexa is, she's been around since before rick rolling became retro. Its gonna be an issue...
Bad ideas and the future are unevenly distributed, so someones vaporware that might roll out in five years was already a shitty product somewhere else five years ago.
None the less we can all pretend to be surprised in 2025 when someone rick rolls my Firefox, assuming Mozilla and Firefox are still around in 2025, LOL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:32AM (1 child)
haha "people like us" and then you get a VLM followup! On topic at least.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday June 16 2018, @02:46PM
VLM knows his stuff when it comes to computers. It's just that he's not so good dealing with anything that requires a conscience, that's all. INT and WIS are separate dice, remember?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snow on Friday June 15 2018, @08:53PM (3 children)
It seems stupid to me too, but I also thought the iPad was a terrible idea.
The only place I can see this being useful is as an app on a TV where you don't have a keyboard/mouse to navigate.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @10:11PM (2 children)
What about people who don't have hands with which to operate a mouse and keyboard?
(Score: 2) by Snow on Friday June 15 2018, @10:17PM (1 child)
They use their feet, just like they have been doing for the last 30 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @11:03PM
And people used to beat their clothes on rocks in the river to clean them.
If they can get this to work effectively, it would be significantly more efficient for simple tasks and browsing.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday June 15 2018, @08:59PM (7 children)
To activate it, you have to say "Hey, Boo!"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Friday June 15 2018, @09:13PM
God Damn Kids get off my lawn and stop yelling "Firefox open http goat sea dot see ex" thru my kitchen window, kids these days don't use Chrome like the good old days when I was young, what is the world coming to?
Given that the internet is for pr0n, and every strip club has some drunken idiot the bouncers haven't thrown out yet, I'm guessing the activate phrase for most people will be a drunkenly slurred shout of "take it all off"
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 16 2018, @01:10AM (2 children)
No, you will have to say, "Abracazabba." Then when the next version is released you will have to say, "ZabbaBAcabra." Then in the next version you will have to say, "LaChupacabra." Then in the next version you will have to grunt twice, click 3 times, then fart into it.
Things like this are Jew plots to induce learned helplessness into the Goys.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 16 2018, @11:43AM (1 child)
Your last line spoiled your complete post.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday June 16 2018, @03:52PM
I suspect that you misunderstand the purpose of his anti-whatever posts.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday June 16 2018, @02:46AM (2 children)
Sigh, nobody gots my joke, Jem.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @10:22AM (1 child)
Yeah, no, can't figure it out.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday June 16 2018, @03:30PM
Scout. "Hey, Boo!" Jem
Google.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(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.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday June 15 2018, @08:59PM (2 children)
Mixed opinions on this.
On the one hand, I would never install it on my own devices, and if they start *demanding* microphone access for it I'll be finding a new browser. But I doubt Mozilla would go that route anyway. And there's a lot of other potential problems that other comments here have already mentioned.
But consider what this might do for accessibility! I don't have much experience with screen reader software personally, but my understanding is that it can really suck sometimes, largely because content just isn't designed to be consumed that way. More mainstream usage of a voice-based browser might start to change that, which is definitely a good thing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday June 15 2018, @09:03PM
That'll be for the NSA and copyright enforcement police, the voice controlled browser pr0n is just gonna be the cover story.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Friday June 15 2018, @10:21PM
I'm all for anything that increases accessibility, because lord knows there's still a long, long way to go.
But, and it's a big but, [youtu.be] I truly dread this. Already I have to suffer idiots walking around yelling conversations into their smartphone speakers instead of holding the thing to their ear. Now I get to also be bombarded by idiots yelling "Hey Scout, where's the best vegan donut shop in Phoenix? How do I get there? How late are they open? What's their Yelp rating? Can I get a reservation? How were they rated in the last health inspection?"
(Score: 1) by deganee on Friday June 15 2018, @10:08PM (3 children)
We all saw the demo of Google calling the restaurant to order food. Maybe the Mozilla people expect Chrome to add support for that.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 16 2018, @01:03AM (2 children)
We also saw that the two demo voices were of a ditzy bimbo and hipster faggot. You can't expect Google to convincingly synthesize other voices when all you have are ditzy boss-fucking bimbos and hipster faggots working there.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 16 2018, @01:05AM
OK, Glass! [wikialpha.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @01:40PM
They also have in the works a 60 year old CXO who just put on a leather jacket for the first time, took off his glasses and is squinting at a prompter trying to read kewl-speak to a crowd of employees.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Aegis on Friday June 15 2018, @11:41PM
I feel like I already yell at my computer enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @09:32AM (1 child)
I'm really looking forward to this, specifically the part where I find the about:config code to disable it.
Same goes for more or less anything added into Firefox in the past 5 years. Sure it takes a few weeks of trawling awful blogs without broken about:config and userChrome.css modifications (i.e. 75% of them - thanks Mozilla for keeping it a moving target!).
Funnily enough, I also look forward to installing random "Apps" to replace the useful functionality that got removed.
Life's so much more interesting with Firefox.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday June 16 2018, @03:57PM
It's possible that as part of this same initiative, Mozilla is also working on removing about:config as a legacy interface.