These are so basic operations that it cannot be true that an online Alexa or Google Home assistant is better than alts.... If you talk about getting informations, routes and others, maybe, but for a simple alarm or a timer, who would require online connectivity....
> but for a simple alarm or a timer, who would require online connectivity....
It's about the experience and ease of use. Sure I can set timers on my phone all day long or lookup conversions but the experience sucks compared to a voice interface. Open solutions like Alice, Mycroft, and Ada all kinda suck unless you leverage the same online services powering Google, Siri, and Alexa.
We have Amazon Echos and these are some of the situations where a voice assistant just works better than anything else:
- You're standing at the kitchen counter multiplying a recipe. It is easier and faster to say "Alexa, how many tablespoons is 9 teaspoons?" than almost anything else.
- You're making Thanksgiving dinner. "Alexa, set a mashed potato timer for 20 minutes. How much time is left on the Turkey Basting Timer?"
- The dentist recommends brushing your teeth for 2 minutes, I setup a routine so when my kiddo is brushing their teeth they can say "Alexa, I'm brushing my teeth." And Alexa will say "Starting the tooth timer" then make a silly noise every 30 seconds to indicate they need to switch brushing top inside to top outside to bottom inside to bottom outside.
- I'm wood working in the garage and need to multiply a dimension. You can't beat screaming "Alexa, what's 24 times 9/16ths?" and getting your answer without having to lookup from what you're doing, find your phone, or do the math in your head.
- You're putting the kiddo to bed and got home late from practice. So you both decide to let them sleep in a little. It's easier to say "Alexa, cancel the 6:30 alarm and set an alarm for 7 am." and Alexa might ask "Do you want to cancel all alarms or just tomorrow's" and you say "Just tomorrow's". No fiddling with the Alarm clock or remembering to adjust it the next evening.
Project Alice can do all that, other non spying assistants too, offline, we have conversion skills, and if not, it's really simple to create, still doesn't require online connectivity
A little bit of an misunderstanding. When I originally said alternatives, I was referring to alternatives to voice assistants like Phone Apps, Google Searches, math in your Head.
That being said, from watching demos of alternative voice assistants on Youtube and going down the rabbit hole of actually setting up Mycroft, Ada, and Project Alice; yes the experience is better with Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant hands down. The setup experience is light years ahead of these projects and the performance/latency is also significantly faster.
That doesn't mean I don't fully support what you're doing. I'm just looking at the current state objectively.
Because you can use whatever FontAwesome (for which I'm an early backer) icon when you are creating a skill for Alice using our backend skill creator on her browser interface. We could exclude the use of fa-brands.
Thank you for the correct analysis of my thoughts at the moment I started Project Alice :-) Often people will think that Alice and the Red Queen is an easy mix and a wrong shortcut to Resident Evil. But indeed, the Red Queen, in the MOVIES, is at the image of Alicia. When RE last part came out, I wanted to include the white queen in Project Alice' mood, but that's not done yet
This is entirely true and I have a few solution I could deploy with some work, the problem is a caching like this consumes power, as you literally listen all the time, as for a wakeword, to cache the audio data in memory and use it ONLY if a wakeword is detected. Now big companies do it in the cloud, we could do it locally, as an option. The path I chose to mitigate that unatural feeling is to use a human answer, bit like at home, you in the kitchen, wife or kids further away, not communicating. At some point you'd call your wife "Alice?" and you'd wait for her to reply for a "yes?" before talking as you are unaware if she's focused on you at the moment or playing with the kids whatever
I haven't looked into the details, but when listening to a wakeword, surely it has to literally listen all the time anyway?
I mean, would it really consume that much extra power to just have a second sink that's just a N-second circular buffer, so you got the samples after the wakeword ready for speech recognition when the wakeword is detected?
Yeah, that's what I said, "as for the wakewords" we listen all the time, looking for a specific wave pattern in the audio and not for words. But the audio is literally always flowing in, on all your satellites and the main unit. The problem with prewarming is that more than analysing a wave pattern in the audio stream, we need to keep a much longer audio data dump in memory in some kind of a FIFO pool. don't take me wrong, it's easily doable, just haven't taken the time to do something polished and not overconsuming for the device running it. Technically, we just need to pool the audio data, say 3-5 seconds depending on hardware used (pi 3 is slow), trim the begining of the length of the wakeword detected length and append the rest of the incoming data while already streaming to ASR, be it local oor cloud based
My guess would be no. After all if you're going through the trouble of setting up a home assistant it'll be mains powered anyway, and the Pis don't actually use that much more power when at max load than when turned off.
I think the ballpark figures for the Pi 4 are 0.5 A when doing nothing, 1A when doing something intensive a single core and 1.2A when at full multicore load.
