Spellcasting at home - voice interfaces without the cloud
Event: Everything Open, Apr 2024 (Gladstone, Queensland, Australia)
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 technology really can be indistinguishable from magic.