I'd like to see this gain traction and grow. Just because of the amount of people that seem to use and like voice assistants it's great to see some work on the open source, non-proprietary cloud side of things.
I also have to admit, I find most of thr current voice assistant technology vaguely creepy knowing every command is possibly stored and saved somewhere outside my control. The fact the systems that do this are constantly listening for phrases and of course the inevitable use of your data for marketing that these services are based on.
I understand the choices seem to be either pay for it or pay with your privacy and data, but I still hold out the naive hope for a technology based future focused on empowering individuals and not service providers and large corporations, sadly it seems this mostly comes from the open source world, which as many articles on hn have touched on, don't tend to get the support they need or they get picked up by large entities who take what they need and surround them by proprietary blobs.
Sorry this got a bit rambling, but anyway, this is a cool project, I hope to see it grow and gain support and adoption.
Where have you seen those choices? What I've seen is either pay with your privacy and data (Cortana for example) or pay for it and at the same time surrender your privacy and data (Alexa, Google Nest).
I was actually in the same opinion as you about remote storage and always on wake detection, and I actually found out that it's possible to make one without all of this!
There are "offline wake work detector libraries" like Snowboy.ai that prevent one of those things, and you can also get self hosted versions of even popular language parsers like the Azure Speech Recognition that you can run in a docker image and have everything stored locally (or not at all!)
Not suggesting you have to go make your own. It just makes me hopeful for the future where we can build useful assistants that don't need all this privacy l-destroying crap in them :)
PocketSphinx seems to have better language coverage but lower accuracy than DeepSpeech, which only has English and Mandarin Chinese.
DeepSpeech was not great about 2 years ago when I first started Dexter and, being a Brit, I had to fake an (awful) American accent to make it work. It's come on well in that time though; I can use my own voice now, which is a relief to those near by. No clue how good its Mandarin recognition is however.
Other folks in surrounding threads have flagged Kaldi which I'll try to take a look at as well (though it also looks to be only English and Mandarin too).
https://kalliope-project.github.io/kalliope/api/synapses/#ru...
Integrating it with various external peripherals should be easy and it's designed to run completely on its own (i.e. no cloud for a lot of things).
Having the voice of the cartoon would attract me though, for the fun factor. Imagine having Dee Dee for error messages:
User: "Dexter, play some music."
Dee Dee: "Ah, I don't want to."
Dexter: "Dee Dee! What did you do to the network connection! I can't reach the Internet! We're doomed!"
I ask this about every voice assistant project: Is the wakeword changeable, or can I set it to multiple?
