
Show HN: Star Trek-like computer with voice interface - rob_mccann
https://github.com/rob-mccann/Pi-Voice
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mcrider
I think there will be some cool applications with this and a Rasberry PI. I'm
floating around this half-baked idea of plugging Rasberry PI's into the light
sockets of my home (since they're all central to the room [better for audio
and microphone quality] and negates the need of running wire all over the
place) so that I can have voice controlled computers in all my rooms and play
music/make calls/automate my home/etc. Being able to ask the computer some
random question and get an answer without having to go to my computer would be
insanely cool to me :)

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Dwolb
Agreed with this sentiment. Something that could ease its way into the home
improvement segment is an embedded linux device with microphone input, speaker
output, powered off 120VAC, fits in a wall box, and input for more microphones
to form an array for better listening.

~~~
rob_mccann
That's the idea behind getting it to run on the Raspberry Pi. Having it choose
the mic closest to the person that says 'computer' would be cool.

~~~
Dwolb
Agreed here. Guess I'm thinking the best way to get this functionality into
homes though is with a board spin of a embedded linux platform (i.e. RPi) that
people could install into a wallbox.

A bluetooth speaker-like package would probably be fine too.

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flixic
Hmmm, on Mac, might be possible to simplify using system's dictation (have no
idea if they have API for that, probably no, but maybe there is a way to hack
it) and system's voice. So then it might be even faster, and would require
mostly just Wolfram|Alpha API key.

~~~
rob_mccann
Sounds like a good idea to me, I wonder if Windows has a similar API too?

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jodrellblank
Since 1995: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API>

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mtgx
The voice is terrible, though.

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Groxx
The future is an API mashup. Neat. It does make me wince a bit thinking that
the actual techniques driving all of this are locked up tight, and subject to
going away whenever the owning business decides to do so. Hopefully the
_actual_ future is a little more open.

~~~
AJ007
There is a view of the future where we query Google (or Siri) by voice and it
just gives us exactly what we want.

I think a better "vision" is an open voice input engine that then connects, or
even bridges, other systems via APIs.

I particularly like the idea of a service such as Zapier bridging a infinite
universe of APIs to connect things together -- "computer request Uber black
car when I receive a Skype call from Jim."

An input engine could create a marketplace of APIs. Commercial services, such
as Uber, could profitably offer their APIs for free. Other services without a
specific product may run their APIs on a cost per use basis. A mass market
cost-per-use API could charge a few pennies per inquiry but still be very
profitable.

Perhaps what I am describing could represent the demise of the search engine
as we know it.

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gavinh
Neat. I'm working on a system and API for question type (factoid, polar,
description, etc.) prediction and polar question answering (polar questions
are 'yes-or-no' questions; Wolfram Alpha doesn't attempt these). Let me know
if you are interested.

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mgamache
I would like to hear more about your project.

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drakaal
It is Siri minus a lot of the language processing. I'm glad to see interest in
the topic since this is the type of thing I am currently working on a
<http://www.stremor.com>

But Wolfram alpha has a lot of things missing, and lots of the things it does
are way longer than I want to hear a computer read to me.

Maybe if the author combined this with our TLDR api, and our Sentence parsring
API, and our Fact search API...

(yes if you use all of our API's you can build this in about and hour and have
it do a lot more) _hint_ _hint_

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hnriot
You're claiming to do better than wolfram alpha? Are there any online demos of
your technology? The better search through semantics has been thrown around
for years, but so far it's never been found to beat the traditional approach.
POS and grammatical comprehension has all the usual brittleness. The best or
the best is CoreNLP, but that's GPL so unlikely to be in your product unless
you've licensed it.

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drakaal
Check us out. We don't use CoreNLP or NLTK. we have our own because everything
else sucked.

And yes I do better than wolfram alpha.

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ckrailo
Why don't you have pricing, dev docs... or... anything other than marketing
speak on your website? I see zero actionable/useful information there.

Edit: And I looked around for like five minutes. I assumed you would have some
easy-to-start sort of thing there since you're telling small Github projects
to use you.

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gingerlime
maybe if you install their TLDR plugin - it will help you find out just the
right info you need on their website ;-)

more seriously though - I felt the same. Lots of marketing talk, but little
actionable stuff to see this put to practice. The Samuru search engine didn't
seem to respond with anything vastly better than google or duckduckgo, but I
didn't really compare searches, or can't think of an intelligent way to do so.

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NotUncivil
Is there an extensible framework for processing Wolfram Alpha-like natural
language queries (presented as text) locally on Linux?

~~~
rob_mccann
python's nltk, I've not yet looked into it but do plan to.

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schappim
You should totally hook Pi-Voice up to NinjaBlocks.com and all your connected
devices!

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Noelkd
1\. do you work for ninja blocks? 2.Just looked at Ninjablocks do they have
microphones?

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mgamache
I don't work for NB, but I think you could probably get an add-in board/USB
solution for audio input. It's based on a Beagle Bone (ARM/Linux). It might
even accept Arduino shields?

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hawkw
So it's open-source Siri in Python? Cool!

