Spellcasting at home - voice assistants without the cloud
Echidna (Gegair) | Thu 18 Apr 1:30 p.m.–2:15 p.m.
Presented by
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Christopher Biggs
@unixbigot
https://christopher.biggs.id.au
Christopher Biggs has been into Open Systems since the early 90s and was there at the birth of Linux and 386BSD. His interest in electronics and connected devices goes back even further. He is also convenor of the Brisbane Internet of Things interest group, and has presented at conferences and user groups around Australia and internationally. Christopher operates a boutique incubator, makerspace and IoT consultancy in Brisbane, Australia.
In his spare time he builds and blogs robots with his three children, and adds to the growing Internet of Things.
Christopher Biggs
@unixbigot
https://christopher.biggs.id.au
Abstract
Voice assistants are bust. Cortana has retired, Siri is stagnating and Alexa is losing money hand over fist.
But there's some new kids on the block. Low cost AI acceleration engines built into recent CPUs mean that problems that used to require a connection to the cloud can now be handled offline. Voice activation - listening for a wakeword, and then conducting a domain specific voice interaction are now things that can be done with a twenty dollar embedded computer.
Those commercial voice systems have to be all things to everyone; open source lets us be lightweight. Sufficiently advanced techology really can be indistinguishable from magic.
Voice assistants are bust. Cortana has retired, Siri is stagnating and Alexa is losing money hand over fist. But there's some new kids on the block. Low cost AI acceleration engines built into recent CPUs mean that problems that used to require a connection to the cloud can now be handled offline. Voice activation - listening for a wakeword, and then conducting a domain specific voice interaction are now things that can be done with a twenty dollar embedded computer. Those commercial voice systems have to be all things to everyone; open source lets us be lightweight. Sufficiently advanced techology really can be indistinguishable from magic.