Comment Re:Amazon (Score 1) 186
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod... is listening 24x7, otherwise how could it hear you say "Alexa"?
Comment Re:Mozilla (Score 1) 186
I'd want it. I'd like to be able to sit at the breakfast table, and say "Hey Open-Source Siri, is it going to rain today?", "What's interesting on Slashdot today?" and things like that, and it tells me, without me getting the jam on the cell phone. Amazon of course does things like that, but I don't want a black box with a 24x7 microphones in my house. If it were open-source, that'd be entirely different.
Comment Re:Mozilla (Score 2) 186
The Vaani wiki states: "No longer an approved project" (right side of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Vaani), unfortunately.
Submission + - What are the FLOSS community's answers to Siri and AI? (upon2020.com)
jernst writes: 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?
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?
Comment UBOS (Score 1) 136
It's focused on running web apps, rather than developing then, but if you can get Apache and PHP and MySQL etc for a webapp like ownCloud fully installed and configured with a single command, as UBOS does, it may help you anyway. UBOS is a very small distro but you can always point your repositories back to Arch, from which it is derived, and that should give you whatever packages you want.
Comment Re:UBOS (Score 3, Interesting) 252
It's very close to Arch Linux. Inheriting rolling release, current versions of packages etc. But we want to do more QA before releasing packages so we can avoid that the user has to "manually fix" app installation problems which doesn't really work for headless, keyboardless devices in home automation etc. And we built a lot of management code on top of package management (pacman) so that the user never has to edit /etc/ or other configuration files, or provision a database, or figure out which files to back up etc. E.g. here are some of the things that the "ubos-admin createsite" command does: http://ubos.net/docs/developer...
Comment UBOS (Score 5, Interesting) 252
We're building a new Linux distro called UBOS for this. It's pronounced You-Boss :-) because there are no backdoors, tie-in's to somebody else's cloud strategy etc. For users, it focuses on making it a lot simpler and less labor-intensive to run web apps at home, and for application developers, it becomes a lot easier to deliver web apps to their users who may not have time (or knowledge) how to provision a database or configure a web server or re-installed apps every time they get updated -- because if we can do that, we don't need somebody else's cloud, and we can be independent netizens doing "indiependent IoT" in our homes http://ubos.net/
