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What are the FLOSS community's answers to Siri and AI?

18 points by jernst ↗ HN
A decade ago, we in the free and open-source community could build our own versions of pretty much any proprietary software system out there, and we did. Publishing, collaboration, commerce, you name it. Some apps were worse, some were better than closed alternatives, but much of it was clearly good enough to use every day.

But is this still true? For example, voice control is clearly going to be a primary way we interact with our gadgets in the future. Speaking to an Amazon Echo-like device while sitting on my couch makes a lot more sense than using a web browser. Will we ever be able to do that without going through somebody’s proprietary silo like Amazon’s or Apple’s? Where are the free and/or open-source versions of Siri, Alexa and so forth?

The trouble, of course, is not so much the code, but in the training. The best speech recognition code isn’t going to be competitive unless it has been trained with about as many millions of hours of example speech as the closed engines from Apple, Google and so forth have been. How can we do that?

The same problem exists with AI. There’s plenty of open-source AI code, but how good is it unless it gets training and retraining with gigantic data sets? We don’t have those in the FLOSS world, and even if we did, would we have the money to run gigantic graphics card farms 24×7? Will we ever see truly open AI that is not black-box machinery guarded closely by some overlord company, but something that “we can study how it works, change it so it does our computing as we wish” and all the other values embodied in the Free Software Definition?

Who has a plan, and where can I sign up to it?

10 comments

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johnhenry
I don't know of any specific efforts to create an open alternative to Siri, but there are a number of speech-to-text translators and natural-language processors that could be combined to do something similar.

There are a number of sites dedicated to aggregating making data openly available on github (https://github.com/caesar0301/awesome-public-datasets), but projects such as Academic Torrents (http://academictorrents.com/) and Dat (http://dat-data.com/) are also making strides in openly sharing data.

Scaling is probably the biggest issue that you've pointed out, but efforts like BIONIC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) allow community members to donate their computing power to projects that they wish to support. Ethereum (https://www.ethereum.org/) also has potential in this area, but given that the network is mostly centered around distributed consensus, it would be more efficient to use a normal computer in this area.

Finnucane
"Speaking to an Amazon Echo-like device while sitting on my couch makes a lot more sense than using a web browser. Will we ever be able to do that without going through somebody’s proprietary silo like Amazon’s or Apple’s?"

Depends. Since the whole point of these systems seems to be precisely to filter your needs through those silos, so they can feed you 'content' and stuff, there'd have to be some compelling use case for an open-source alternative.

Kaizyn
There is a compelling use-case. The voice-controlled home. Think like the ST:TNG AI and how it helps people do things.
Finnucane
I, for one, have no desire for a voice-controlled home. What would be the advantage to me? It would just become another thing that needs maintenance and replacement. How often do you need to fix a light switch in your house? It's rare; it's a reliable piece of equipment. I've lived in houses with pre-WWII push-button switches that remained in service because they just keep working. Why would I replace that with something that needs firmware updates, security patches, and then eventual replacement when the manufacturer decides it's not going to provide support any more? Or, if it's open source, just becomes another abandoned project?
grizzles
I'm working on something open source / maybe disruptive in this space but I'm not ready to announce anything yet. I'm always looking for collaborators though. I think there are easy solutions to all the problems you mention. For example, if you need data, go to youtube.