8 ms·
I doubt the guts of something like an Echo would be capable of containing any kind of speech to text model. It'll probably be a lot more of a concern in a few y
by gr4yb34rd 4y ago
I doubt the guts of something like an Echo would be capable of containing any kind of speech to text model. It'll probably be a lot more of a concern in a few years when speech models like that are getting baked into cheap chips for consumer devices, though.
- dehrmann 4y agoEarly versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking ran on Pentiums.
- chickenchicken 4y agoI remember seeing this on a trade fair as a child with my mother in 1993
- PointyFluff 4y ago[dead]
- phire 4y agoDragon Naturally Speaking required extensive training on the voice of the user, and the result wasn't as accurate as modern machine-learning speech-to-text models. You had to watch it and actively correct it's results. IMO, the accuracy of modern speech-to-text models is still nowhere near accurate enough. Maybe they should bring back the per-user training
- woodruffw 4y agoI'm not as doubtful: iPhones have had on-device speech recognition since at least 2019, with iOS 13[1]. Amazon might have legal or policy reasons for not doing offline speech recognition, but the technology has been there for a while. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/sfspeechrecognitionrequest/3152603-requiresondevicerecognition?language=objc https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/sfspeechrec...
- sokoloff 4y agoHas the tech been available in a $29 device that also includes a speaker and a microphone array?
- woodruffw 4y ago$29 is the sale price, not the BOM price. The entire point of "smart" home devices is to reduce consumer friction around revenue-driving actions; it would be surprising if Amazon were to prioritize making a profit on a $29 device rather than the sales and subscriptions it facilitates.
- jrockway 4y agoI don't know if it's every smart home vendor's goal to drive revenue. Apple sells their smart speakers for $100 or $300, which doesn't seem like a "loss leader" price, and it doesn't ask you to buy anything else. Their marketing page mentions what it can integrate with (smart locks, smart lights, etc.) but those things are notably not subscriptions. If you buy a smart light switch and a smart speaker, then you can just say "Hey Siri turn off the lights in the kitchen" and nobody ever gets any more money, and you didn't have to go downstairs and turn off the lights in the kitchen. This seems like a very justified smart home. I am skeptical of all things proprietary technology, but Apple's stuff bothers me the least.
- gigel82 4y agoYou can run whisper.cpp (a very solid TTS) on a Raspberry Pi (https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/discussions/166 https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/discussions/166), so I'm pretty sure with a modest CPU upgrade an Echo would be more than capable of running it locally.
- physicles 4y agoTrue, but note that they're using the tiny model. In my experimentation, you need at least the small model to get transcription I'd call "good", which is still a bit slower than you'd like on a moderately fast laptop from 2019. That said, whisper is incredible and the era of very good local speech-to-text on moderate hardware is basically here, or will be in the next year.
- vineyardmike 4y agoNot gen 1 devices but in 2023 some of the echos do partial on-device processing of commands (same with HomePods and same with Google home).