
Almond: An Open, Privacy-Preserving Virtual Assistant - tlrobinson
https://almond.stanford.edu/
======
jmiskovic
I was more impressed by this project's backbone service Thinkgpedia, a common
natural language interface to different web services and internet-connected
hardware. I'll definitely find use for it in future!

I started using Almond application for Gnome. It delivers on many fronts, but
still lacks polish.

Some typed prompts would never get an answer. Some prompts got misinterpreted,
for example "tell me a dad joke each day at 9 am" would get scheduled at 12
am. The wake word is followed by audio ping, but there should also be a visual
clue.

Still, very cool technology. My favorite skill is "Miscellaneous Interfaces"
with queries for random number, opening URL, throwing a coin...

I'll try to stick with this for a week, to automate some OS actions and my git
work flow.

~~~
jmiskovic
After few days of evaluating I see that Gnome client is broken in several
fundamental ways and unusable as of now.

    
    
        - No way to clear history, it's getting huge now and mostly consists of "Sorry, I don't understand" answers
        - When going to My Skills and back to chat, it scrolls to beginning which is frustrating.
        - Scheduled actions never actually happen.
        - In-app "training" doesn't work, returns "Sorry, I did not understand that. Use ‘help’ to learn what I can do for you." 
        - Online training _could_ work if one could learn their ThingTalk language. My usecase was simple - teach it that "throw dice" is same as random number from 1 to 6, but I could not conjure precise ThingTalk spell.
        - Screenshot, locking PC and other OS actions didn't work on XFCE. Not Almond's fault, but less usable for me.
    

Are authors dogfooding? It lacks quite a few quality-of-life improvements.

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tlrobinson
Home Assistant (the excellent open source home automation project) recently
integrated with Almond (and Ada for voice): [https://www.home-
assistant.io/blog/2019/11/20/privacy-focuse...](https://www.home-
assistant.io/blog/2019/11/20/privacy-focused-voice-assistant/)

~~~
Fnoord
How do I know which home automation project I should invest my time into? I'm
aware of at least 3 FOSS ones.

~~~
JshWright
Home Assistant is the clear winner, in my mind. It's a very robust project
(four full-time devs, plus a huge community), very actively developed
([https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-
notes/](https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-notes/)), and
has a very healthy and helpful support community.

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z3t4
Too bad Chrome stopped supporting the web speech-to-text API. But I guess it
overwhelmed Google's network/servers!? I remember back in Windows XP? There
was speech recognition, where you first had to read a bunch of text in order
to train it. It didn't use a online service afaik. And it was decent. With
today's hardware it should be possible to do speech to text on the client! eg.
without sending the audio to the cloud for processing!

~~~
rezonant
Web speech to text is still available on Chrome...
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html)

~~~
z3t4
I get a cryptic error message that just says "network", others seem to have
the same problem. Does it work for you??

Here's another demo that shows the error message at the bottom:
[https://mdn.github.io/web-speech-api/speech-color-
changer/](https://mdn.github.io/web-speech-api/speech-color-changer/)

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Quequau
Can anyone tell me how this is "Privacy-Preserving"? Like how is this
different than what the major tech firms like Google, MS, and Apple offer?

~~~
t0astbread
From what I can tell it's available as actual software running on your device
instead of an online service. Additionally, it seems to be fully free
software.

~~~
eis
From what I can read in the privacy policy, speech recognition is performed
via an API from Microsoft. So it's both online, cannot be considered fully
free software (as a major part is performed by a closed API) and I'd hesitate
to call it privacy preserving. At least when using the voice command feature.
Written commands should be offline, private and done by open source I think.

Someone please tell me I'm wrong.

------
eis
From the Privacy Policy:

> The Almond app also makes use of the Microsoft Cognitive Services Speech API
> to perform speech recognition. This is only activate when you click on the
> "Listen" button. ... These services are governed by their own privacy
> policies.

Too bad. I hoped this would have an offline speech recognition engine.

Also with all the talk about preserving privacy I find it disappointing that
you have to dig through the privacy policy to see that your audio is sent to
MS.

~~~
capableweb
Yeah, with that 3rd party's (and whoever else) policy, Almond is neither
"Open" nor "Privacy-Preserving". The title almost seems like clickbait now.

The project itself (Almost) seems very useful though and I would gladly use it
if it could run locally instead.

~~~
azinman2
Can you tell me what you found useful?

None of their examples made sense to me... notify me when the nytimes adds an
article? So... like constantly? Or filter on a keyword? Like I’m going to know
ahead of time all the potential keywords for a given article of interest that
hasn’t been written yet? And I need to know that second vs my daily news
consumption during the right time?

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ViViDboarder
This talks about privacy and data ownership, but I can’t tell from the site if
the processing is all local (like Snips or Mycroft) or if data still has to be
trusted with a remote party. Maybe I missed something.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Mycroft is not at all all-local. It also sends audio data into the cloud for
processing. It's a disgrace really.

~~~
ViViDboarder
Oh wow! Well, glad I went with Snips then.

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dang
A thread from 2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532003).

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leeoniya
also [https://getleon.ai/](https://getleon.ai/)

~~~
gravypod
It would be cool to integrate the deep speech engine with home assistant.
That's one of the big benifits of leon in my opinion.

