[TriLUG] FOSS voice assistant framework

[Jack Hill via TriLUG]

On Tue, 18 Jul 2017, Tim Jowers via TriLUG wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Has anyone worked with a FOSS voice assistance framework?  I am not really
> happy with Siri, Samsung, or Alexa from the developers perspective. I
> imagine one could setup something with a raspberry pi DIY etc so people
> could input voice and get back help.
>
> To me, seems like a great opportunity for collaboration and also for FOSS
> to provide revenue streams to developers. One issue with the big companies
> is they tend to take over any good ideas and bundle them. ("bundling"
> technique of market dominance)
>
> Also not happy from the user's perspective as Alexa has exposed my 6 year
> old and several neighbors repeatedly to curse words and no telling what
> concepts. I called Amazon and they said they would work on it if they get
> enough requests. At this point, had to disallow usage unless parents are
> present. Samsung voice assistance is really weak, of course.
>
> Been years since we touched on this stuff in college; so, let me know if
> there is any formal collaboration on language modeling/ontology stuff, too.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Tim

Tim,

Just yesterday, I became aware of two projects to create free machine 
learning models of voice recognition:

https://voice.mozilla.org/
http://www.voxforge.org/

As I understand it, the idea is that speech recognition software needs a 
huge corpus of training data to work well (which is exactly what Google 
and Amazon have). With some extra constraints (like a limited vocabulary) 
you may be able to get by with less training data.

As far as actual utilities that make use of voice recognition, I was able 
to find

https://cmusphinx.github.io/2015/01/ila-voice-assistant/
https://cmusphinx.github.io/2014/04/jasper-personal-assistant-for-raspberry-pi/

I haven't use them, so can't make a recommendation, but it could be 
interesting.

Best,
Jack