
Google starts throwing cash at Google Assistant startups - samnwa
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/2/17310312/google-investment-startups-assistant-travel-hospitality-games
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tristanj
Google IO is next week, I'm surprised they announced this today rather than at
the event. Maybe Google has bigger plans in store.

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batiudrami
I can't imagine why you'd build a service which is completely reliant on a
Google product given their shotgun strategy of product development.

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zapita
(Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in the field and might have misunderstood the
current state of affairs. Please correct me if you spot a mistake).

My understanding is that the computational costs of speech-to-text are
prohibitive for many consumer startups, leaving them with no choice but to
integrate with Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, who subsidize S2T costs in
exchange for near-complete control over the user relationship.

Unfortunately it looks like the economics of voice assistants will drastically
favor Big Tech, and make it harder for new entrants to compete.

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ocdtrekkie
I remain a bit baffled by this. Speech to text on a desktop PC with a 400 MHz
processor back in the day was "pretty decent". I don't know if I really feel
like what people get with Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google, etc. is actually
significantly better... so why is this prohibitively expensive in our modern
era of multi-gigahertz phones?

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catmanjan
Because customers aren't satisfied with pretty decent when it comes to speech
to text, if it isn't state of the art there's someone just around the corner
doing it better....

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ocdtrekkie
I mean, is the processing power of today's voice software actually impossible
to do without a cloud service subscription, or is it that the developers
working on the problem today would rather not work on it for local operation
because they can't charge cloud pricing or collect user data that way?

Most local voice processing solutions seemed to stop dead in their tracks,
developmentally, when companies figured out we could make this a cloud
service, but I don't know if I really believe it's technically unfeasible the
other way.

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zapita
There is at least one startup working on a local solution (I forget their
name), but my understanding is that it's still technically inferior - for
example it can only support very small vocabularies.

The bottleneck is simply raw gpu compute power available.

I completely agree with you that the technical gap might be caused in part by
incentives from cloud companies. Why invest in researching something that
makes your core business less valuable?

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foota
Amazon and Google both most likely have more to gain from reducing their
compute requirements for in house voice recognition than from keeping the cost
high for others.

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exgooglex
Opposite strategy as the Alexa fund. Looks like Google is tackling software,
as Amazon takes to hardware/IoT.

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code-elegans
Interesting observation. More funding for all of us then?

