[HN Gopher] Leon: Open-source, self-hosted personal assistant
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Leon: Open-source, self-hosted personal assistant
Author : thunderbong
Score : 188 points
Date : 2022-09-04 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| leonroy wrote:
| Uh-oh, did you have to call it Leon?
| afro88 wrote:
| But what can it actually do?
| [deleted]
| malermeister wrote:
| How does this compare to some other open source, self hosted
| assistants?
|
| rhasspy comes to mind, but i believe Mycroft can be self-hosted
| too.
| hungryotter wrote:
| I've tried to self host myfcroft but after tinkering with it
| for about 3-4 hours I gave up. They provide little to no
| information for self hosting. Sure, you can use their pre-built
| docker image but you still have to create an account in their
| cloud and connect to it. And their privacy policy is not so
| great imo.
| joestrong wrote:
| I did figure out how to do it at one point. I think you had
| to remove some default config from a JSON file to stop it
| connecting to their cloud. You still had to query Google
| directly for the STT though
| malermeister wrote:
| I believe they hired the rhasspy dev though and he's been
| trying to change this for the better.
|
| We'll see if he gets anywhere...
| [deleted]
| ttgurney wrote:
| Looks like quite a lot of marketing put into this open-source
| project. Heavyweight glossy website with trendy TLD, emojis
| everywhere. Is this kind of thing typical in the JS world in
| particular? Seriously asking.
|
| I'm trying to figure out what they are selling me, or what
| megacorp they are associated with, but I don't see it yet.
| IMcD23 wrote:
| And yet, I set out to find what this thing can do. I read the
| README. Today, the most interesting part is
| about his core and the way he can scale up. He is pretty young
| but can easily scale to have new features (skills). You can
| find what he is able to do by browsing the packages list.
| Sounds good for you? Then let's get started!
|
| The packages list is a dead link. https://github.com/leon-
| ai/leon/tree/develop/packages
| kenny87 wrote:
| > The packages list is a dead link. https://github.com/leon-
| ai/leon/tree/develop/packages
|
| From the blog ...
|
| "As of now, 'module' and 'packages' no longer exist. Instead,
| they've been replaced by 'skills'."
|
| New link is https://github.com/leon-
| ai/leon/tree/develop/skills
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| All those folders just contain a single json file with the
| name of the skill category in it? I don't see any actual
| features?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Right? I'm finding this problem everywhere. When checking out
| new software, it's becoming more and more difficult to
| determine what to do with "good looking marketing," and it
| nearly cuts perfectly in roughly 3 ways; you're likely either a
| dedicated whatever-size team making something great that
| happens to have good marketing; you're a small team pushing
| garbage and putting all your money in marketing, or you're a
| megacorp (e.g. likely not great)
| yewenjie wrote:
| > Is this kind of thing typical in the JS world in particular?
|
| Yes, pretty common in the frontend world.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| coscorrodrift wrote:
| >Heavyweight glossy website with trendy TLD, emojis everywhere.
| Is this kind of thing typical in the JS world in particular?
|
| yeah in frontend projects/dataviz stuff for sure
| arisAlexis wrote:
| This is overly suspicious. The guy made a nice effort and open
| sources it. Would you prefer he had it closed source or sold
| it?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| It's a showcase for a front-end framework. See the link at the
| bottom. https://vercel.com/
| yunohn wrote:
| Sure, but vercel has nothing to do with the UI look. It's a
| framework for developing the overall application, not the
| components or designs.
| wetmore wrote:
| Vercel is not a front-end framework. Also that's a
| sponsorship link.
| inezk wrote:
| "Leon uses AI concepts, which is cool." - somehow this really
| discouraged me from looking deeper into it.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > somehow this really discouraged me from looking deeper into
| it.
|
| I was also discouraged by that remark. But I've never had (or
| even used) Alexa or Siri or whatever; they're a cool idea, but
| I'm not prepared to rely on either of those sevice providers.
| So I'm interested.
| [deleted]
| pvg wrote:
| _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article or
| post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ianbicking wrote:
| It seems to be written by a young guy, English is his second
| language, and he's excited to be learning different
| technologies along the way.
| titaniczero wrote:
| English is his second language, I'd cut him some slack and
| create a PR to fix it and help him instead of criticizing.
| yupis wrote:
| Thanks. Looks awesome.
| pvg wrote:
| A thread from 2019:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19152561
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Checked out the repository's homepage. Is it just me or do other
| people hate the buzzword of "virtual brain"?
|
| Seems like everything is being described as that or a "second
| brain" these days.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| Am I the only one freaked out by the focus on a Leon instance
| setup unnecessarily framed as being "born" in their documentation
| materials here?
|
| > $ leon create birth
|
| > At this stage, Leon is born and can already start to run via
| this command: [...]
|
| It seems like an unnecessary anthropomorphization.
| [deleted]
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Does it make you twice before you kill Leon or its children?
| [deleted]
| mdaniel wrote:
| This probably was submitted due to their recent blog activity, in
| which they talk about their NLP improvements:
| https://blog.getleon.ai/a-much-better-nlp-and-future-1-0-0-b...
| fxtentacle wrote:
| self-hosted?
|
| "You are in control of your data. Leon lives on your server"
|
| Speech-to-Text: Google Cloud, IBM Watson, Coqui STT, Alibaba
| Cloud (coming soon), Microsoft Azure (coming soon)
|
| So the AI assistant lives on my server, but if I want to have
| good quality speech recognition, everything I say is sent through
| a US cloud service. The only offline option, Coqui has a 7.5%
| word error rate [1] on LibriSpeech test clean, which is worse
| than Mozilla Deepspeech 2 from 2016 [2]. State of the art would
| be around 1.4% [3], meaning 81% less errors than Coqui.
|
| [1] https://coqui.ai/blog/stt/deepspeech-0-6-speech-to-text-
| engi... [2] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/deep-speech-2-end-
| to-end-sp... [3] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/pushing-the-
| limits-of-semi-...
| [deleted]
| j1elo wrote:
| They might be interested in integrating Vosk, it's a speech-to-
| text engine that is just a shared library (.so file on Linux)
| and comes with API support for a variety of languages:
|
| https://alphacephei.com/vosk/
|
| https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api
|
| Still, I've found that the Big players have much better
| recognition models, and the post-processing that I assume they
| do (grammatical, maybe syntactical inferences that improve the
| end result) are probably much more powerful too.
| spullara wrote:
| There aren't any good speech-to-text models that are open
| source. If you think there is one, please reply with a link.
| The cloud ones are far superior.
| jjulius wrote:
| Right, and that's fine. The point is that if that's the case,
| it's incredibly disingenuous to say that you are in control
| of your own data if you use Leon.
| prmoustache wrote:
| That doesn't make it right to lie.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I fully agree and I would love to change that. I mean my
| company already funded work in that direction... but I sadly
| predict that we won't have good open source real-time speech
| recognition anytime soon.
|
| My napkin calculation is that you need about $100k for each
| attempt at training a Conformer-Transducer. There's a pre-
| trained NVIDIA model but it appears to have a bad choice of
| hyperparameters and performance is much worse than what one
| would expect based on research literature and I believe
| you're not allowed to execute it on non-NVIDIA hardware.
|
| A skilled team will maybe need 5-10 attempts for discovering
| a good set of hyperparameters. So the price to create the AI
| model will likely be around $1 mio. But if you have such
| large expenses, you have to plan things as a business
| venture. And that means an open source release is highly
| unlikely.
|
| (unless, of course, someone like stability.ai is happy to
| bankroll 200 A100 GPUs for a few months each per target
| language. In that case, please contact me)
| RussianCow wrote:
| I don't think the open source ones need to be superior to the
| cloud ones, or even as good. If they come close enough for
| the most common, let's say, 80% of use cases, that's good
| enough for many people.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Currently, they are like 5x the error rate, which is
| significantly worse.
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| Those are beautiful animations / visual graphics on the landing
| page.
|
| Awesome job!
| Vaslo wrote:
| Why would you take this over Mycroft? Is there a difference?
| diroussel wrote:
| Do you have a problem with that, Dave.
| eterps wrote:
| What are some obvious use cases for something like this? I really
| have trouble imagining what you would use it for.
| hackcasual wrote:
| Most of my 30 something friends have ditched their Alexa's and
| Google assistant devices because of concerns around security
| and privacy. The ability to say "set a timer for 30 minutes" is
| nice, but not enough to invite always on microphones into
| private spaces
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > my 30 something friends
|
| That's a lot of friends! Good job.
| nell wrote:
| dad, is that you?
| verdverm wrote:
| Are you winning son?
| kvirani wrote:
| Wait what. When I hold the main button on android and say
| exactly that, it means I have an always on microphone??
| qbit42 wrote:
| The "always-on" microphone feature is used to listen for
| "Okay Google", if you have that enabled.
| kvirani wrote:
| I see. So you can still use these assistants without the
| privacy concern then. So why abandon?
| bee_rider wrote:
| If I have to hit a button to activate the voice
| assistant, that removes use-cases like "my hands are full
| but I want to turn on the smart lights" and "I'm cooking
| and want a timer, but my hands are too dirty." These are
| the use-cases where the tool really shines because it has
| no competition.
|
| Without such a use-case, the tool gets put in the back-
| of-mind. Sure it might be marginally easier to use than
| swiping and poking, but my mental model of using the
| phone is already swiping and poking.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Disclaimer: I don't have one of these and don't
| particularly want one. The privacy concerns kinda creep
| me out. That said, I've been to friends homes and seen
| them use it.
|
| As far as I can tell the primary use case for these
| things is to be <random place in your home> and then just
| say out loud "Alexa, set a timer for ....". I've heard
| that you can order stuff from Amazon also using your
| voice. I think a third use case starts with "Alexa, tell
| me a joke".
|
| I'm assuming that there's other things you can do with
| these (and would love to know, if anyone's willing to
| share).
|
| So - if the solution to the privacy concern is to walk
| over to the device and push a button then that seems to
| remove most of the usefulness of the device. Speaking as
| someone who doesn't want one / doesn't have one of these
| things I can totally see how eliminating the "voice
| control from anywhere" feature leads to opting out of it.
|
| (When I'm walking around my home I've always got my phone
| on me (which, to be fair, has a bunch of privacy concerns
| too) so I can more easily set a timer / buy something on
| Amazon / Google for jokes by fishing my phone out of my
| pocket and then using that, rather than walking over to
| push a button.)
|
| (The "what else can you do with these" is a genuine
| question - if people are comfortable sharing I'd love to
| hear what you can do with these)
| mod wrote:
| I have Alexa, although I'm going to remove her and
| replace with a locally-hosted thing.
|
| I've tied mine in with home automation stuff. So I can
| turn on and off lights using voice, even if I'm not at
| home. I sometimes forget to turn off my workshop and I
| can do that from anywhere.
|
| I'd like to figure up a way to reset my internet, because
| I access cameras, and it goes out sometimes. I'm very
| sure this can be done.
|
| I also use her for weather, although I'm annoyed about
| some of her limitations there, and I intend to get
| exactly what I want by coding. I want to be able to ask
| things like "when will it rain next", but Alexa can't do
| that.
|
| She can also do reminders in a week or whatever, I use
| that some. And I ask very simple questions that she can
| query Google for, but honestly she's terrible at it.
|
| I also think she's too verbose, even with verbosity
| turned down. She just goes on and on sometimes workout
| being asked--like instructions on resetting the routers
| if she can't contact Amazon.
|
| I also try Google assistant and Bixby. I use my watch for
| a lot of the things you said you use your phone for.
|
| Anyway I'm not happy with any of them. I plan to work a
| bunch on some skills as my next project, after the
| current one is done.
| hackcasual wrote:
| There's a lot of little use cases. Hand free cooking
| stuff (set a timer, home many tablespoons in a pint).
| Device control, faster to turn off a TV with voice than
| dig for the remote, or play a playlist/skip songs. None
| of those really save that much more time than the old
| fashion way, so concerns about privacy mean things get
| done the old way.
|
| I know some people like having them in if they have
| frailty or mobility concerns, which is probably the only
| really new usecase.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| That's just one of several privacy concerns. It's
| possible to parse voice locally, as in TFA and eg
| Mycroft('s open source, self-hosted version, anyway), but
| for "some reason" mainstream assistants don't do it.
| Sure, you can hold a button, and Google will only hear
| about your timer request and nothing more, but some
| people find the idea of Google knowing when you're
| setting timers to be upsetting. Or at least worthy of
| avoiding.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| They do actually do on device processing now...
|
| Siri, G Assistant, Alexa, Bixby, Sonos all perform at
| least some locally. It seems the major issue is large
| dictionaries (eg music libraries) or complex queries.
| Most had an article about how basic features (times,
| smart home) work entirely on device.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22523438/apple-
| iphone-siri...
|
| [2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/05/07/google-
| assistant-...
|
| [3] https://www.amazon.science/blog/on-device-speech-
| processing-...
|
| [4] https://www.xda-developers.com/samsung-bixby-will-
| speed-up-r...
|
| [5] https://www.engadget.com/sonos-voice-control-music-
| assistant...
| mod wrote:
| When my internet is out, Alexa won't even listen to me
| (besides her name)
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Do any of them have a setting to enforce on device
| processing only?
| bergenty wrote:
| When I used to use Alexa there were a lot of unexpected things
| that came up and I used it atleast 15+ times a day. Things like
| what's the weather like, what time is it, set a timer, unit
| conversions, turn on/off lights or appliances, when is it going
| to rain, factual google information, when was someone born,
| what's the sports scores, I like trivia so it could ask you
| questions while you were lounging around etc. and so many more
| things to be honest. I stoped using it like 3 years ago though,
| can't have an always on speaker in my house that sends all its
| info back to Amazon, no matter what assurances they give me.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Personal assistants can really make a difference to people with
| disabilities
| eterps wrote:
| That's an excellent point, maybe something that should be
| addressed on the site.
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