Snowboy stop development

[pepebc]

KITT.AI announces: on December 31, 2020 stop the development of all their products
Have you thought of an alternative?

[Sispheor]

We are evaluating some alternatives.
Fell free to propose as well.

[corus87]

We don't have much options at the moment, there is still porcupine but its not open source.

With the next Kalliope release we are able to use mycroft precise trigger which is open source, I'm already played a bit with precise, but to create a good wake word, it need to take a lot of training but its not very user friendly.

We need at least a good Kalliope wake word, therefore we need to collect some voice samples from the community then it needs a lot of datasets (for example I have downloaded 50GB from the mozilla common voice datasets) to train my wake word.

I'm going to push a community based precise trigger after the next release of Kalliope.

[khimaros]

a few resources since i was just researching this:

• https://github.com/castorini/howl
• https://github.com/seasalt-ai/snowboy
• https://github.com/Picovoice/porcupine

you mention porcupine is not open source, do you mean the models?

[Miloune]

Maybe this one as well: https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api ?

[Sispheor]

So, the best option is porcupine?
I have some time in the next coming days to work on Kalliope. I'll test some trigger engine myself.

[corus87]

I did take a look into vosk mentioned by @Miloune, it looks promising and at least in the german dataset the word "kalliope" is recognized. I don't have much time lately but a first try with a simple script for a single keyword worked pretty good.

[Sispheor]

Their is also the Snips project implementation. Used by Rhasspy.

[Sispheor]

So for porcupine we cannot generate model for RPI, and generated models need to be recreated every 30 days if I understand well.
So for me it looks like a no-go.

[khimaros]

if you are considering vosk, i'd recommend taking a look at mozilla deepspeech which i found to be both easier to configure and considerably more accurate. they also have examples for streaming transcription in python and bulk transcription in python

[Sispheor]

I thought they were more stt engines than wake word engines.

[khimaros]

@Sispheor -- that's right, including vosk. i'm not sure if either is a good fit for a snowboy replacement, but if you're going to go that direction i think deepspeech is a better target from my limited experiments.

[khimaros]

snips looks promising but appears to have been acquired by Sonos. i couldn't find the platform source https://github.com/snipsco?q=platform&type=&language=&sort= and their usage docs have been removed. the closest available is https://github.com/snipsco/snips-record-personal-hotword

[Sispheor]

Another similar project has created a list of wake work engine here.
They have created their own called Raven. Not yet a python lib but it seems to be full python. Need to take a look.
For me I think the best candidate is mycroft-prcise

[pepebc]

I have tried all and i prefer mycroft-precise, with good accuracy.
Raven is still a very young development, with many false positives.
And the mentioned vosk is very interesting

[Sispheor]

The problem with Mycroft is mainly that the only supported arm proc is armv7l.
I don't find a doc with a full map of all RPI but I think it's recent ones.