
Ask HN: What is an open-source alternative to Google Home? - holaboyperu
I&#x27;m wondering what type of technology can be used to build something like Google Home without the privacy concerns from Google or the government listening.
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swalsh
I'm not sure what it's going to be, but I know we're on the verge of another
"Microsoft vs Linux" moment. This is going to be a major OS that almost all
people will have in their homes (my echo is older than my son, he is growing
up just expecting to be able to ask a computer to do what he wants). Bots will
be as natural to him as mobile phones are to Generation Z, and the internet is
to Millenials.

Right now it seems the proprietary systems are winning the race, which makes
sense. Financial incentives are strong... but I firmly believe an open source
alternative is better (from a purely capitalistic point of view, I personally
compete against amazon... and the further we move from desktops the harder
that is).

So, if someone asks for funding, and has a good background, i'll throw a few
bucks towards them.

~~~
_RPM
Do you really believe that every one will have this in their home?

~~~
swalsh
No, I think there are going to be some tech guys who refuse to buy it for "tin
foil" reasons. Generally speaking, I think "normal" people will continue to
adopt it as the value increases.

My own experience though has pretty transformative. My mother, father-in-law,
even my wife approached the device with extreme caution. However as they
watched me naturally interact with it, they all gradually warmed up to it....
and now it's a must have. The other day I walked into my kitchen, asked Alexa
what the weather was outside, but she was unplugged. It was weird... kind of
like calling your grandma only to realize she's not alive any more.

~~~
_RPM
I'm only 25. Maybe I'm too old, but talking to a device/machine has always
seemed very unnatural to me. I don't think I'll be buying one of these.

~~~
forthefuture
To me it's the fact that Amazon / Google is already making more than the cost
of these things in the data they extract from every sound in every house
they're in. They should be paying people to use them, not the other way
around. I'd be interested in a free alternative even if it's just to say "what
time is it" when I wake up and "weather" before I leave every morning and not
have to press anything. The technology itself seems very easy to integrate
into life. I'm just not trying to pay someone to eavesdrop on me just so they
can be there to say it's raining outside.

~~~
mcintyre1994
They don't listen/transmit until you say the hotword right?

~~~
_RPM
Who knows without doing a deep packet inspection of your network.

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colinramsay
There's a project called Jasper [1] that can use a variety of different
speech-to-text backends and allows you to write plugins to process commands.

For me the biggest issue is actually capturing audio. Something like Google
Home or Amazon Echo will have one or more very good microphones in and trying
to source those separately ends up being surprisingly expensive.

[https://jasperproject.github.io/](https://jasperproject.github.io/)

~~~
b0sk
Looking at Jasper, it uses AT&T or Google or Facebook (wit.ai) as backend
(forget the other two, offline speech recognition is hard because it's a data
problem and training your models is hard and your performance will be
prohibitive).

If you intent is privacy, then using the backends offered by AT&T or Google or
FB doesn't fly.

~~~
daveloyall
The point is that Jasper uses the backend you select.

But yes, to meet privacy goals, you'll need that backend to be local.

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jbob2000
Well, I guess my question to you is, what would this thing do without Google?

If you ask it for directions, are you going to build your own mapping engine
or just use google maps or another third party solution?

If you ask for the latest basketball news, are you going to search google or
are you going to build your own web crawler?

If you ask it to play your favourite song, where will it play the music from?
A local hard disk? A service like spotify, apple music, or youtube?

Without Google (or Amazon, if it's the echo), you don't really have much
except a voice-to-text box if you want to exclude their services.

~~~
Joeri
Directions can be done offline just fine using openstreetmap data and a
library like graphhopper. Music could and should be locally stored. And yes,
the news has to come from a server, but this could be done anonymously instead
of with the full range of google tracking.

I'm starting to get really annoyed at the tendency to put everything online
when it doesn't need to be. Online-integrated devices are brittle and have a
built-in expiration date. We should prefer devices for which online
integration, if it exists at all, is optional and easily replaced by your own
server.

~~~
RIMR
>We should prefer devices for which online integration, if it exists at all,
is optional and easily replaced by your own server.

This is something that's only going to be important to the tech-savvy. Your
typical consumer wants idiot-proof instant gratification, and cloud-powered
apps and devices provide that.

~~~
nightski
Privacy is not something only cherished by the tech savvy. The problem is,
there is a lack of openness about the deal being engaged in when using these
services. Consumers do not know what is being done with their data or even
that it is being collected. That may be obvious to us, as engineers who
understand it, but it isn't to your every day user. They are not stupid. It's
just that our industry is not transparent and to be honest pretty damn
deceptive in how customers are engaged.

~~~
crdoconnor
We really need a ratings agency for IoT devices that gives them a score based
upon how much they leak data.

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hiddencost
Well, depends on what you want to do. Good far field speech recognition
requires on the order of 10k hours of training data to build a good acoustic
model for large vocabulary problems. And it needs to be recorded with the same
mic set up as you expect at run time.

I am continually frustrated by people that think speech recognition is a
software problem.

~~~
b0sk
Yep, it's a data problem.

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nathan_f77
It's really not the same thing, but I've just installed Home Assistant [1],
and have been playing around with it today. It automatically picked up my Hue
lights and Chromecasts, and I set up presence detection with Locative.

For voice recognition, it's just not worth trying to do something yourself.
I'm still going to get an Amazon Echo, or maybe the Google Home when it comes
out.

[1]: [https://home-assistant.io/](https://home-assistant.io/)

~~~
lima
Or just OpenHAB and the Eclipse Smart Home project.

It's a well-established projects attempting to establish a standard for IoT
interoperation - and it's working really, really well.

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superice
Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer at Athom.

We at Athom, a smart home startup based in the Netherlands, are releasing the
Homey very soon. It features an open app platform based on NodeJS, has support
for Z-Wave, 868MHz, 433MHz, Zigbee, IR, WiFi and Bluetooth, not to mention it
has some pretty decent voice recognition as well. It isn't strictly speaking
open source as the core of our software is proprietary, but we're trying to
contribute back to the community on every piece of open source software we do
use. We've opened pull requests on various NodeJS projects, we have someone
actively working on Linux kernel development (primarily drivers), and every
protocol we add support for is open sourced on our GitHub account. We maintain
the node-nfc npm module, and are contributors to a handful of other projects.
We're about the closest you can come right now to a functioning smart home hub
incorporating lots of open source elements, while still having the advantages
of corporate backing.

Feel free to browse around on our website
([http://athom.com/](http://athom.com/)) or on our GitHub:
[https://github.com/athombv](https://github.com/athombv)

~~~
dsr_
Here's the basic question: if Athom is purchased by Amazon a year after I buy
a Homey, how long will it continue to function after Amazon turns off your
servers?

(The answer needs to be along the lines of: "the product will be accessible
and configurable from the built-in web service and API until the hardware
breaks. Extra services provided by Athom subscription will stop working, but
you could provide many of them yourself if you have your own server and are
competent to read our documentation.")

~~~
superice
That is pretty much the answer, yes. Sure, some features will break, like out-
of-the-box speech to text, but most of the core functionality will continue to
work properly, and it definitely won't be a Revolv 2.0 :)

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bbthorson
I would check out www.silklabs.com, they had a pretty successful kickstarter
campaign for their device and just open sourced their platform.

Former Mozilla people I believe.

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drivingmenuts
Problem solved: a dimmer switch.

I look at stuff like Google home and wonder what problem they're trying to
solve and if they've actually made it disappear or just hidden it behind a
wall of ever more complicated marketing.

None of it particularly scares me, but the older I get, I think things need to
get simpler and a voice-activated, centralized home control system isn't it.
Especially when I'm 80 and have enough problems figuring out where my cats hid
my glasses (I expect they'll probably have hidden them on my head - sneaky
bastards).

Literally, the only product of the past decade that I can think of that nailed
it was Nest. They decided to replace the thermostat and so they replaced the
_thermostat_. Sure, it ties into your phone and whatnot, but the brains are in
the little box you hang on the wall and you don't _need_ the extra
connectivity.

IoT sounds great, but, yeah. Light switch is simpler.

YMMV

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nameless912
I was actually thinking about writing one meself. My plan looked something
like this:

Raspberry Pi with a python script running that does microphone->speech
recognition (I was going to use Google's dictation service, but you could do
it however you want)->voice-API.

The voice API will look something like a regular old REST API does, but for
humans: it'll have a bunch of trigger words that would emulate API endpoints
(e.g. "play" for music, "turn the lights" for light control, etc.) with the
rest of the query being fed as the parameters. And anything that is
unrecognized would be assumed to be a question and passed to WolframAlpha or
something similar.

Has anyone tried something along these lines?

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ocdtrekkie
The biggest things right now that I haven't found good replacements for
outside of the walled gardens:

\- The sort of whole room audio microphone setup found in Amazon Echo and
Google Home.

\- Really solid Google-grade speech recognition and hotword detection.

\- Search.

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umeboshi
Mycroft.ai

~~~
sgarrity
For the lazy: [https://mycroft.ai/](https://mycroft.ai/)

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d135_1r43
I think a combination of a Raspberry Pi and
[http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/](http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/)
might be a good start.

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markshuttle
Mycroft just open sourced their framework. They are using snaps on Ubuntu Core
to make an open home voice gateway.

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miket
Check out [http://sirius.clarity-lab.org/](http://sirius.clarity-lab.org/)

