[HN Gopher] Mimic 3 by Mycroft
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Mimic 3 by Mycroft
        
       Author : Vinnl
       Score  : 316 points
       Date   : 2022-06-29 23:03 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mycroft.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mycroft.ai)
        
       | notjustanymike wrote:
       | That's a wonderfully effective marketing video. It's funny, gives
       | me a background on the technology itself, and effectively
       | highlights the new features.
        
         | krisgesling wrote:
         | Thanks :)
         | 
         | I'm going to assume this isn't our developer Mike's alternate
         | account congratulating himself lol
        
       | derac wrote:
       | Very cool, thank you! I am using the mimic3 cli and using
       | --voices to get a list of voices, but after that I can't figure
       | out how to find the list of speakers for that voice.
       | 
       | edit: Ah I see they are in speakers.txt in the git repo for the
       | voice.
        
         | krisgesling wrote:
         | That's some good feedback thanks!
         | 
         | The other option is to jump on https://mycroft.ai/mimic-3/ and
         | use the "Hear my voices" tool. There are three drop-downs: -
         | language - model - speaker
        
       | js4ever wrote:
       | I just tried the docker command from the readme to test it and
       | unfortunately it's not working :(
       | 
       | docker run -it -p 59125:59125 -v "${HOME}/.local/share/mycroft/mi
       | mic3:/home/mimic3/.local/share/mycroft/mimic3" 'mycroftai/mimic3'
       | 
       | UI loads but when I click on the speak button I get this error:
       | PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied:
       | '/home/mimic3/.local/share/mycroft/mimic3/voices'
        
         | julius wrote:
         | sudo chmod a+rwx "${HOME}/.local/share/mycroft/mimic3"
         | 
         | fixed it for me
        
           | js4ever wrote:
           | Thanks it's working for me too :)
        
       | programd wrote:
       | I really like the fact that it can be used offline. Sadly it
       | seems to be AGPL licensed, which makes it pretty much untouchable
       | by anything adjacent to any sort of business which employs
       | lawyers.
        
         | bhaney wrote:
         | > pretty much untouchable by anything adjacent to any sort of
         | business which employs lawyers
         | 
         | Darn
        
         | stavros wrote:
         | Then contact the authors and pay for licensing, easy peasy!
        
         | kelnos wrote:
         | The linked post seems to indicate there are commercial
         | licensing options. Of course, businesses would prefer to use
         | this for free, but I'm sure they can pay for a license that
         | doesn't bind them to the terms of the AGPL.
        
           | salmo wrote:
           | Big companies want to pay and have "support." Lawyers don't
           | like licenses, they want a proper contract.
           | 
           | But if it's AGPL, I'll move on. They're too idealistic to
           | deal with megacorp. They don't sell through intermediaries,
           | can't/won't be insured enough, etc.
           | 
           | Inevitably the small company sees $$$ and goes nuts trying to
           | sell even when warned not to. Then the risk management and
           | contract stuff kicks in, drags out, and kills it.
           | 
           | The small company blew a bunch of cash on nothing. Or they
           | base sales projections on it. I've seen a couple go under.
           | 
           | Those are people's livelihoods and I can't do that to them.
           | 
           | That's not limited to AGPL, but the license is a signal of
           | that type of business. And they never do the smart thing with
           | megacorp and sell through an established intermediary.
           | 
           | Takes a lot of good software off the table.
        
             | happymellon wrote:
             | This is complete hogwash.
             | 
             | Most companies are fine with BSD/MIT software with
             | absolutely no support. Your argument holds absolutely no
             | water compared to what they actually want which is to take
             | other people's work and close it up for profit.
             | 
             | If they want a license to close it up, they can pay for it.
        
             | kelnos wrote:
             | I mean, that's fine, though, right? If they don't have the
             | headcount to sell support contracts, and that's not the
             | kind of company they want to build, that's their choice. I
             | sympathize; running a company like that doesn't sound
             | particularly pleasant. You quickly lose focus on building
             | the actual technology and spend too much time on enterprise
             | sales. And if they don't want to give away their software
             | under terms that let people put it behind a web service
             | without releasing changes, that's also their choice.
        
         | pierotofy wrote:
         | AGPL is a good license for open source.
         | https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html
         | (and we should get more open source projects to consider it)
        
           | wmf wrote:
           | There's a big difference between pure AGPL and bait-and-
           | switch AGPL. IMO using AGPL to steer people towards paid
           | proprietary licenses is not good for open source.
        
             | happymellon wrote:
             | It only steers you to proprietary licences when you want to
             | use other people's code without sharing with others the
             | benefits that you got by using open source software.
             | 
             | Use others to gain an advantage, then pull up the ladder
             | after you.
             | 
             | I'm not surprised that large corporations want to have
             | their cake, eat it and not pay for it but it's not a
             | compelling argument for people producing opensource
             | software
        
             | pierotofy wrote:
             | Dual licensing deals can fund work on the AGPL code, which
             | is good. It's not ideal and has some compromises, but
             | should not be discarded.
        
         | hobo_mark wrote:
         | But why? It's released as a docker container, say I deploy this
         | container, as-is, with Cloud Run or Lambda or whatever, since
         | I'm not "linking" my code against it, I'm just sending it SSML
         | requests as one of several TTS backends, no virality provision
         | applies, I just have to provide users with a download link to
         | the same upstream code I am using. I imagine a lawyer working
         | at a technology company can understand the use case I just
         | described and pattern-match it against the AGPL requirements,
         | what am I missing?
        
         | synesthesiam wrote:
         | The voices are under a CC-BY-SA license, so you can generate
         | all the audio you want (offline), even for commercial usage.
        
         | lovelearning wrote:
         | Companies like Amazon seem ready to throw cash at their lawyers
         | but not at the developers whose source code they grab to build
         | commercial products.
        
         | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
         | Sadly this is the same sentiment felt by Foss people around
         | proprietary and even stuff like MIT licensed things. MIT is
         | cool and all but it can be used to build proprietary software
         | which is like ideologically troubling.
         | 
         | Guess both sides have strong feeling why something is "bad".
         | 
         | I personally only contribute to agpl software, try to use
         | agpl/sspl and similar licensed software.
         | 
         | Guess the " corporate mentality" and "Foss mentality" don't
         | meet unless it's a corp built around Foss products and
         | ideology.
         | 
         | Look at valve and their deck compared to Nintendo switch.
        
       | malermeister wrote:
       | How well does Mycroft integrate with home assistant?
       | 
       | I've previously used rhasspy (by the author of this feature
       | apparently, he got a job at mycroft and stopped development of
       | rhasspy) with some custom scripts as glue to home assistant as my
       | local-only smart home solution.
       | 
       | Can I do this with mycroft? Does it maybe come with a Home
       | Assistant integration? My main worry is that mycroft seems to be
       | doing a bit _too much_ for my taste. Is there functionality
       | overlap /conflict between HA and Mycroft?
        
       | throwaway2016a wrote:
       | I've been dying to replace my Echos with an open source smart
       | speaker but half of them use AWS or Azure for test to speech and
       | speech synthesis so really all you are in control of is the
       | software that runs on the device itself. So this is a coo step in
       | the right direction.
        
         | kelnos wrote:
         | They're also just really not great. I tested out Mycroft a
         | couple years ago and found that the success rate for getting it
         | to understand its wake word and listen for commands was under
         | 10%. Maybe if you buy their prepackaged product, it works
         | better, but that's not something I want to do. I just want to
         | run it on a Pi 4 (which they claim works) with a mic array.
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | 10% doesn't sound much worse than my Alexas' 30%...
        
             | kelnos wrote:
             | My Google home is pretty near 100%; I can count on one hand
             | the number of times it hasn't "heard" me over the past
             | year. That's my benchmark.
        
             | kevinmgranger wrote:
             | And if it's anything like siri, it can barely do anything
             | useful, so it doesn't matter if it understands you.
        
               | jjeaff wrote:
               | "I searched the web for 'shutup stop mute stop talking'
               | and here is what I found on Wikipedia..."
        
               | slickdork wrote:
               | counter point, I use my alexa daily and don't run into
               | many issues with voice recognition, or it's lack of
               | understanding.
               | 
               | Daily uses:
               | 
               | 1) in the AM i set up all my needed reminders for 5
               | minutes before every meeting I have
               | 
               | 2) it's connected to my hue bridge so I can turn off/on
               | lights by asking while laying in bed, which is wonderful.
               | 
               | 3) I play music all day.
               | 
               | 4) It reminds me 10 minutes before every sunset to go
               | outside for a walk.
        
               | 314 wrote:
               | I find Siri really useful - for a very limited set of
               | tasks where recognition is about 100% and being hands
               | free has a benefit. Typically this is starting exercise
               | workouts and countdown timers. For more general tasks the
               | recognition is still good (for me, seems to cary by
               | voice) but even at 90% there will be one mistakes in most
               | requests.
        
           | Brendinooo wrote:
           | They've done a lot of work in the last year on the software
           | side. Might be worth revisiting. They're tentatively on track
           | to (finally!) ship in September of this year.
        
           | krisgesling wrote:
           | Yeah I think there are two sides to this coin (and just for
           | clarity - all of this relates to Picroft, not Mimic 3 the TTS
           | engine that just launched). The audio hardware makes a huge
           | difference to audio input which is why we've developed the
           | custom SJ201 board that's in the Mark II. But even on DIY
           | units we have been making big improvements on the wake word
           | detection by better balancing our training data sets. Once
           | the Mark II is shipping there are additional wake word
           | improvements on the roadmap. Eventually the system will
           | optimize for the users of each device. So the wake word model
           | on your device wouldn't be exactly the same as the model on
           | mine. We've also ported the Wake Word model to Tensorflow
           | Lite which means it uses a small fraction of the system
           | resources that it used to :D We're also about to make some
           | bigger changes to mycroft-core that will help to support a
           | broader range of hardware in a more consistent way. So whilst
           | you could try it again today and I can guarantee it's better
           | than the last time you used it, if you want a DIY system
           | instead of a Mark II - I'd suggest adding a reminder to check
           | it again in a couple of months once these bigger changes
           | land.
        
             | kelnos wrote:
             | That sounds fantastic! Thank you for replying; I'll
             | definitely check back and give it another go.
        
         | Semaphor wrote:
         | The Rhasspy [0] author recently got hired by mycroft to work on
         | satelites and fully local. Rhasspy requires a lot of manual
         | work, but replacing Alexa is already possible. I'm somewhat
         | stuck with the current hardware availability issues, but I have
         | a Pi 3 satellite that does wakeword detection (this is supposed
         | to be handled by Pi Zero 2 W in the future) and sends the voice
         | to the MQTT server running on a PI 4, the data gets picked up
         | by the Rhasspy instance also running there, it does STT, intent
         | recognition, sends the intent to home assistant and then does
         | TTS back to the satellite.
         | 
         | My main software issue is currently how to replicate the music
         | functionality. Playing music at the satellite that requested
         | it, lowering the volume when it recognizes the wakeword.
         | Preselection of "commands" for band and genre names should be
         | easily scriptable afterwards.
         | 
         | In a quiet room, I have no issues with wakeword detection using
         | a playstation eye camera (I wanted the seed USB microhphone
         | array, but between discovering it and starting with buying
         | hardware the supply chain bit once again)
         | 
         | [0]: https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
        
           | Havoc wrote:
           | Didn't realize rhasspy already has satellite support. I shall
           | have to check that out!
           | 
           | I've got a home server and a seed array so would be ideal to
           | split that mic (rasp) and processing
        
           | puchatek wrote:
           | And how well does STT work when the room is not quiet
           | anymore, e.g. when music is playing?
        
             | Semaphor wrote:
             | My understanding is, that the seeed array would work better
             | than the PS eye, but for the volume I normally listen music
             | at, it still works okay.
        
               | krisgesling wrote:
               | Yeah we aren't using the seeed array in the final Mark
               | II. But we have used the same XMOS XVF-3510 to perform
               | acoustic echo cancellation. That means, even with music
               | blasting out of the speakers, you can still wake the
               | device from across the room.
               | 
               | In a simple fashion you can think of it as subtracting
               | the audio being output from the audio coming in from the
               | microphone.
        
           | rcarmo wrote:
           | Playing music from a Plex server is a major use case for me,
           | and I have given up on Rhasspy because I couldn't get all the
           | pieces to work together (I have the mic array HAT and a
           | Synology I can run recognition on). Do you have a write-up of
           | your setup?
        
             | Semaphor wrote:
             | > Playing music from a Plex server is a major use case for
             | me, and I have given up on Rhasspy because I couldn't get
             | all the pieces to work together (I have the mic array HAT
             | and a Synology I can run recognition on). Do you have a
             | write-up of your setup?
             | 
             | I have not yet managed / worked enough on it (the lack of
             | HW making everything theoretical, which kills my
             | motivation). The way I understand it, is that there'll
             | either be a casting server on the satelite, or a pulse
             | audio/pipewire server reachable via network. But I have
             | next to no experience with consumer linux, so the
             | configuration of those parts is... hard.
             | 
             | But there are many tutorials for playing multi-room audio
             | (with icecast or something), I just assumed it would be
             | easier without multi-room as I don't need it, but it turns
             | out it's not ;)
        
       | fbn79 wrote:
       | On Android, years ago I could install IVONA
       | (https://nextup.com/ivona/) for free. Worked totally offline and
       | was better than embedded Google TTS and the Mycroft voices from
       | youtube presentation. Now looks like the app is not in the App
       | store any more. Then whas purchased by Amazon and disappeared
       | from Google store.
        
         | deno wrote:
         | Amazon bought IVONA. But it still works if you've saved the
         | APKs[1].
         | 
         | [1] https://pastebin.com/85EaB10w
        
       | thecosmicfrog wrote:
       | Glad to see Popey lives on in Mimic 3. Does it have a better
       | understanding of beans these days?
        
         | synesthesiam wrote:
         | I believe I fixed the bean bug ;)
        
         | black_puppydog wrote:
         | And his voice sounds so realistically popey now!
        
       | synesthesiam wrote:
       | Hi all, author here. Besides the tech of Mimic 3 itself, I'm
       | interested in training voices in as many (human) languages as
       | possible. All it takes is one person willing to donate a dataset
       | for everyone to benefit!
       | 
       | ...well, that and a bunch of stuff with phonemes. But I'll do
       | that part :)
        
         | wilsonjholmes wrote:
         | Where could I donate my voice?
        
         | josephg wrote:
         | How can people contribute? I'd be happy to sit in front of a
         | microphone for awhile if I could use my own voice in a TTS
         | engine!
        
           | sampo wrote:
           | They want you to make good quality audio recordings of you
           | speaking about 20 000 phrases. It could take 40 to 80 hours
           | of speaking and recording, maximum 4 hours per day.
           | 
           | https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic-recording-studio
           | 
           | https://mycroft.ai/contribute/
        
             | synesthesiam wrote:
             | The amount of data depends on if there's a voice for the
             | language already. If so, about 2 hours of data is usually
             | good enough. Otherwise, 10-20 hours usually does it.
        
         | worthless-trash wrote:
         | What kind of workload are we looking at, do you care for the
         | Australian accent?
        
           | krisgesling wrote:
           | Bloody oath we do!
        
             | krisgesling wrote:
             | Translation: "Yes"
             | 
             | ... Hi from Darwin :D
        
         | rjzzleep wrote:
         | What does it take to add Chinese and Japanese to this? Surely
         | it's a lot more than just training sets right? I have an
         | android phone without access to google tts, so this might
         | actually potentially be a nice alternative.
        
         | dEnigma wrote:
         | Can't you use the Mozilla Common Voice dataset for that?
        
           | krisgesling wrote:
           | The Mozilla Common Voice dataset is awesome - however it's
           | useful the opposite purpose - speech-to-text. This is because
           | it is a lot of different people using a range of hardware,
           | speaking similar phrases.
           | 
           | For good text-to-speech you need 1 person speaking different
           | phrases but very consistently. Here's an example dataset from
           | Thorsten a German open voice enthusiast:
           | https://openslr.org/95/
        
       | Jarvy wrote:
       | Oh, I've been waiting to try this out! Love to see the multitude
       | of ways to interact with it. The webserver seems really nice.
       | Gonna try it out with Home Intent to see how it works with a full
       | voice assistant on a pi 4.
       | 
       | Note: I am am the main developer of Home Intent.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | nunodonato wrote:
       | I have an idea for an OpenAI GPT3's integrated chat assistant.
       | Would this product be a good fit to do it? I mean, hardware wise
       | and then put custom software on top without too much tinkering?
        
         | joelthelion wrote:
         | When people think about using GPT-3 for real products, I always
         | wonder about the running costs. These models are so big that
         | even inference can be fairly costly to run. Any thoughts on
         | that?
        
           | nunodonato wrote:
           | Davinci is expensive, but the other models can be quite
           | affordable even with finetuning. I dont see problems for a
           | personal assistant based on them (edit: from a personal usage
           | point-of-view. if you are making a product for others to use,
           | that's different :)
        
       | mrlinx wrote:
       | No portuguese? Weird. 6th most spoken language.
        
         | krisgesling wrote:
         | It's all a question of what data we have at the moment.
         | 
         | If you know of any good Portuguese voice datasets we'd love to
         | train one. At some point we'll start getting new professionally
         | recorded data for each language too.
        
       | anotheryou wrote:
       | for me as a german angry german sounds hillarious
       | 
       | https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3-voices/blob/master/sampl...
        
         | krisgesling wrote:
         | Haha yeah Thorsten the person behind the voice is such a nice
         | guy - I'm not sure that "angry" is really in his nature :D
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | Quequau wrote:
       | Does anyone know just how much of the total functionality of
       | Mycroft is actually running on the Raspberry Pi? I asked this
       | question four years ago on Reddit (I'll paste the response below)
       | and now I wonder if things have changed, particularly with regard
       | to speech to text.
       | 
       | There are several 'layers' to a voice assistant;
       | 
       | Wake Word - that detects when you are speaking to the device.
       | This is local to the device and we use PocketSphinx.
       | 
       | Speech to text - that detects what you say to determine Intents -
       | we currently use a cloud service for this
       | 
       | Intent matching - this is done locally using our own open source
       | software - Adapt and Padatious
       | 
       | Skills - Intents then match to Skills. Some Skills require
       | internet connectivity.
       | 
       | Text to Speech - We use our own software called Mimic for this,
       | it's local to the device.
        
         | notahacker wrote:
         | If they're marketing it as "fully offline", they ought to be
         | doing the speech to text bit locally now. Worked on part of a
         | platform which could use Rasa for this a couple of years ago,
         | but running on something a bit more powerful than a Raspberry
         | Pi!
        
           | krisgesling wrote:
           | On device STT will be available before the Mark II ships in
           | September!
        
         | diggernet wrote:
         | According to their privacy policy (https://mycroft.ai/embed-
         | privacy-policy/):
         | 
         | "*When you use our Services including the Mycroft Voice
         | Assistant, your voice and audio commands are transmitted to our
         | Servers for processing.*"
         | 
         | So it appears that STT is still cloud-based, which is a pity.
         | That's the only thing keeping me from ordering one today.
        
           | krisgesling wrote:
           | On device STT will be available before the Mark II ships in
           | September!
           | 
           | As will a new privacy policy that better reflects what we
           | actually do.
        
           | suyash wrote:
           | Interesting so they run the services on cloud and advertise
           | their company as on device, what a bunch of crooks.
        
             | krisgesling wrote:
             | On device STT will be available before the Mark II ships in
             | September!
             | 
             | Note: I'm from Mycroft
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | The blogpost linked in this submission says the following:
         | 
         | > Mimic 3: Mycroft's newer, better, privacy-focused neural
         | text-to-speech (TTS) engine. In human terms, that means it can
         | run completely offline and sounds great. To top it all off,
         | it's open source.
         | 
         | If "skills" are what I think they are (something like external
         | commands, for example "Play X on Spotify"), then my
         | understanding would be that everything _but_ those runs offline
         | and local-only.
         | 
         | But if things like `speech to text` requires internet
         | connection and sends the data to some cloud service, then the
         | entire value proposition of this product falls apart.
         | 
         | I hope that's really not the case, as that would be outright
         | lying and false advertisement.
        
           | bluGill wrote:
           | The raspberry pi 3 that is used in older products doesn't
           | have enough power to be all offline. Maybe you could setup a
           | server at home (but they won't help you!), but you cannot do
           | it on the hardware they have. The next gen mycroft 2 (should
           | ship this fall - first announced many years ago) will have a
           | pi 4 which might have enough power to run offline, this isn't
           | clear yet.
        
             | capableweb wrote:
             | > might have enough power to run offline, this isn't clear
             | yet
             | 
             | It's very unclear and misleading to put "it can run
             | completely offline" if you're not 100% sure it can actually
             | run "completely offline", hardware be damned.
        
       | drunkenmagician wrote:
       | Nice, but the choice to implement a resource intensive AI project
       | (CPU/RAM) on Pie in Python is baffling. I could not think of a
       | worse implementation language for a resource constrained
       | environment -\\_(tsu)_/-.
        
         | synesthesiam wrote:
         | Python is only really the glue here. The models are trained in
         | PyTorch and exported to Microsoft's Onnx runtime (C++). So the
         | bulk of the inference CPU cycles are outside Python.
        
       | ruph123 wrote:
       | Since when are they having concrete plans and shipping windows to
       | sell Mark II? A few years ago I signed up to be informed when
       | Mark II finally sells. I already had given up.
        
         | zmxz wrote:
         | What an invaluable comment, just like mine.
        
       | wyldfire wrote:
       | What an awesome project! And AGPL is really perfect for this kind
       | of work.
       | 
       | What's the BOM look like? I'd love to understand more about the
       | design. The software's open source, right? After a brief skim I
       | didn't see a repo link. Does anyone know where the source is? Do
       | they use an AI accelerator DSP/TPU or just plain-old-software-on-
       | a-CPU?
        
         | krisgesling wrote:
         | Hey there - the source for Mimic 3 can be found here:
         | https://github.com/mycroftAI/mimic3 It can run CPU only or
         | accelerated with a GPU.
         | 
         | Regarding the BOM, I assume you mean the Mark II? That you can
         | find here: https://github.com/MycroftAI/hardware-mycroft-mark-
         | II/tree/m... We actually ended up designing our own RPi
         | daughterboard called the SJ201. It's mostly an audio front end
         | with an XMOS XVF-3510 and dual mics, but also includes a 23W
         | amp, some LEDs for feedback, buttons, a hardware mic switch,
         | GPIO breakout and power management (amongst other things).
        
       | azalemeth wrote:
       | This looks awesome and I love seeing FOSS, privacy-first
       | equivalents of Big Tech. The video was really, really cute - and
       | you could hear the improvements of the tech as time went on. I
       | must confess that my initial thought about watching it was that
       | it was something to help blind or partially sighted people,
       | however, as a document-to-words reader. Only later did I twig
       | that they are essentially Alexa-speaker-alikes.
       | 
       | Therefore, I'll ask the question I always think of when I see
       | smart speakers: what exactly _is_ their use case? I 've never
       | used voice assistants. I've never had a PA. I have a variety of
       | good, dumb speakers. If I am cooking, I have the radio on in the
       | background and a smartphone in my pocket if I desperately wish to
       | change something. I've always thought that the voice recognition
       | was _cool_ , but I've just never quite recognised a position
       | where I would use it!
       | 
       | For the record, I live in a house with at least two raspberry pis
       | on all the time (one as a DTV tuner) so I am far from a luddite
       | in that regard. I just genuinely don't really know what use-case
       | a smart speaker solves. Please enlighten me!
        
         | vidarh wrote:
         | I use mine for at least half a dozen timers on an average day.
         | The more you use it, the more often you get the impulse to just
         | set another timer, be it for "remember to stop playing that
         | game and be productive" or remembering to leave the house on
         | time, because it's so simple. I also use it to turn off/on the
         | tv and lights. Not much of a point if it's a single one, but
         | helpful when it's a number of lights, e.g. when we go to bed or
         | leave the house, and you can address them all with a group
         | ("alexa turn off downstairs"/"alexa turn off everything").
         | 
         | And to play music. Just asking it to play a track and then
         | asking it to play similar music (very hit and miss), for
         | example, and then asking what's playing, all without having to
         | reach for my phone, finding an app etc.
         | 
         | My experience was that I bought my first one mostly because I
         | wanted something to play music on in the living room anyway and
         | didn't really care about getting a full on stereo setup as I'm
         | not very picky about the sound quality, but I was curious. I
         | _never_ use voice assistants on my phone. But I found myself
         | using it more and more as I got used to being able to turn
         | things on /off without reaching for anything or when my hands
         | where otherwise full.
         | 
         | It's not something I'd have the slightest difficulty of living
         | without, but it feels like it's decreasing friction for a lot
         | of small things.
         | 
         | I now have four - one by my desk, one in the living room, one
         | in my sons bedroom and one in mine.
        
         | thejohnconway wrote:
         | Saying "hey dingus, add $item to the shopping list" is a killer
         | feature for me. It's so much easier than adding something
         | manually on your phone (especially if you have your hands full
         | cooking). Reminders and timers are something I use too. It's
         | also pretty good for playing music when you don't have
         | something particular in mind: "play some classical music" for
         | example.
         | 
         | It's definitely something I could live without, but even
         | Apple's speaker is pretty cheap. Especially so if it's your
         | main speaker (if you care about audio quality it might be a
         | problem, but I don't so it's not).
        
         | Fredej wrote:
         | My dad uses the Google speaker for two things:
         | 
         | - Making animal / fart sounds for his grand-children.
         | 
         | - Timers for cooking ("Hey Google, set timer to 4 minutes).
         | 
         | I recently spent a month at my parents place. I really, really
         | miss the timer thing.
         | 
         | Additionally, I can see voice assistants as a pretty good
         | interface for Home Assistant. At least for some parts.
        
           | whywhywhywhy wrote:
           | Timers is the only thing I've used Siri for since the first
           | weeks of it's introduction.
           | 
           | End of the day feels like it's the only thing it's good for
           | and it often fails at even doing that.
        
       | dmos62 wrote:
       | Let's get down to business. How do I use this as my Android TTS
       | engine?
        
         | krisgesling wrote:
         | No Android release yet unfortunately, but you can drop your
         | email in the bottom of this page and select the platforms you
         | are interested in to be notified about specific future
         | releases: https://mycroft.ai/mimic-3/
        
       | NileTheGreat wrote:
       | Any chance you'll add just the SJ201 board on its own to your
       | store? I'd love to experiment with my own case designs, but
       | already have too many PCBA projects on my TODO bench, and am
       | totally okay with paying a premium for a pre-assembled RPi
       | daughter board.
        
         | krisgesling wrote:
         | We do get this request a bit but not yet at the scale where it
         | is economically viable for us to do so.
         | 
         | I would however point out that the Mark II is completely
         | hackable. So whilst it's not an SJ201 on its own, you can
         | absolutely pull the whole thing apart, use it in other
         | enclosures and even put it all back together again.
         | 
         | Another one of the reasons we made it is because having a
         | single daughterboard greatly simplified production and made the
         | Mark II more robust overall. There's no longer the possibility
         | of a loose wire to the power supply or amp after it gets kicked
         | around in the back of a delivery van. They're all in one and
         | connected via the 40 pin GPIO header, but absolutely removable
         | from the Mark II unit itself.
        
       | tunesmith wrote:
       | That video is hilarious.
        
         | riffraff wrote:
         | I had skipped the video, I went back and watched it, and I
         | agree, it's brilliant.
        
         | imranq wrote:
         | Agree! I wonder if a sitcom using only artificial voices is
         | coming soon
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | follower wrote:
           | Here's my pitch semi-related to that topic from when the beta
           | Mimic3 made it to HN: :)
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31422342
        
           | simcop2387 wrote:
           | Written by GPT3 and illustrated by Dall-e. Coming soon to a
           | spammy YouTube channel
        
       | cridenour wrote:
       | How would the licensing of the audio output work? If I wanted to
       | use this to record some TTS style files for a game - would there
       | need to be attribution? It wouldn't be shipping or using the
       | actual code, just the final audio.
        
         | krisgesling wrote:
         | The audio for all of the voices produced from public data sets
         | is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0
         | International. This is what a lot of the original data is
         | licensed as.
         | 
         | Full license text here:
         | https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3-voices/blob/master/LICEN...
         | 
         | and an explainer on what the legal mumbo jumbo means here:
         | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | follower wrote:
         | > If I wanted to use this to record some TTS style files for a
         | game
         | 
         | On that topic, you might be interested in this tool I've worked
         | on which works with an earlier TTS project the primary Mimic3
         | developer created:
         | 
         | https://rancidbacon.itch.io/dialogue-tool-for-larynx-text-to...
        
       | knodi123 wrote:
       | How do you actually use it on a project? I see where you can
       | order a dedicated piece of hardware, but I'd love to download
       | this and replace pyttsx3 on my homemade IoT linux server.
       | 
       | But all I see is documentation, discussion of what they used to
       | build it, and.... where's the actual softare?!?
        
         | krisgesling wrote:
         | Hey there, instructions for installation are all here:
         | https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/mimi...
         | 
         | and the source code is available at:
         | https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3
         | 
         | There is currently a Docker image, DEB package, and PyPI
         | release.
        
           | knodi123 wrote:
           | yeah, that did it. thanks!
        
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