[HN Gopher] DeepSpeech Is Discontinued (2020)
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       DeepSpeech Is Discontinued (2020)
        
       Author : LorenDB
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2025-06-25 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | dabinat wrote:
       | It was discontinued 5 years ago - I'm not sure why it took so
       | long to archive the repo.
       | 
       | https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/future-of-deepspeech-stt-aft...
        
         | HelloUsername wrote:
         | Perhaps OP URL can be changed to
         | https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mozilla-DeepSpeech-Discontinue...
        
           | LorenDB wrote:
           | I'd change it, except this submission is past the edit
           | window. Perhaps dang or tomhow will see this and change it
           | for me :)
        
             | altairprime wrote:
             | You should email them about that!
        
             | HelloUsername wrote:
             | Then comments should be moved hither:
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44380572
        
               | altairprime wrote:
               | If you email that to the mods, they'll do so :)
        
         | xeonmc wrote:
         | Imagine an alternate timeline where Mozilla had named this
         | project "FreeSpeech" instead as a free and open TTS solution.
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | My personal little conspiracy theory is that Google pays
         | Mozilla as an antitrust shield.
         | 
         | A lot of us pretty much assume that much, but I think it goes
         | much deeper.
         | 
         | I think Google pays and maintains a working relationship with
         | the CEO of Mozilla (current and former) to purposely keep the
         | organization rudderless, uncompetitive, and shrinking.
         | 
         | Mozilla spends its money building a 3D VR metaverse here, a
         | bunch of AI models it later scraps over there, a web3 /
         | distributed social program, etc. It scraps Rust, doesn't invest
         | into Firefox. Just silly toys and experiments.
         | 
         | That nice CEO salary is hush money.
         | 
         | Just a fun little pet theory, totally not based on evidence.
        
           | Teever wrote:
           | I don't know if there's a direct quid pro quo relationship
           | between the CEO of Mozilla and Google but I feel quite
           | confident that Google absolutely influences the organization
           | in ways beyond just the cash injection to make it rudderless,
           | uncompetitive and shrinking as you say.
           | 
           | It could be as simple as ex-Google employees at lower levels
           | than CEO who are paid by Google take positions at Mozilla, or
           | more subtle things like guiding the direction of the
           | organization through standards boards.
           | 
           | It would be really fascinating to look at the org charts of
           | Mozilla past and present and try and build the network
           | between people who worked at Google or Google related
           | organizations before, during, and after their time at
           | Mozilla.
           | 
           | Because you're absolutely right that the organization is so
           | absolutely dysfunctional that it can't just be incompetence,
           | it has to be absolute malice.
        
             | Devorlon wrote:
             | Yes simple things such as becoming employed at Mozilla to
             | perform corporate espionage for Google.
        
           | CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
           | Has a nice sound to it but Hanlon's razor says: never
           | attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
           | incompetence. I'd be impressed if this was the case but I
           | expect neither side is sufficiently competent or malicious to
           | explain it.
        
       | ipsum2 wrote:
       | I've been using Nvidia's parakeet model, it's been better than
       | Whisper v3 large and smaller. Only supports English.
       | 
       | https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2
        
         | nico wrote:
         | Does it need a newer GPU? Or can it run on just CPU?
         | 
         | Would it run on a raspberry pi?
        
           | GaggiX wrote:
           | Look up for faster whisper or distilled whisper models,
           | smaller models run quite nicely but perform poorly outside of
           | English, if you are interested in a different language it's
           | better to finetune it (HuggingFace has a huge amount of
           | finetuned Whisper models).
        
           | ipsum2 wrote:
           | If you want real-time, it requires a GPU, but can be
           | underpowered. CPU is a little slower but works fine.
        
           | lupusreal wrote:
           | Best CPU TTS that can run on something like a raspberry pi is
           | Piper. It can do real time synthesis on a raspberry pi and on
           | a real computer it runs several times faster with negligible
           | performance cost. I use it for 'reading' ebooks when my eyes
           | get tired. The quality is roughly on par with where Mac OS's
           | TTS was ~10 years ago (the last time I used it.) You can tell
           | it's TTS, but it's good enough that you can become accustomed
           | to it fairly easily.
           | 
           | https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
        
             | GaggiX wrote:
             | They are talking about STT, not TTS, but as a TTS piper is
             | very good and works nicely on a raspberry pi, I agree.
        
         | 100xlong wrote:
         | are there any linux/mac apps that allow people to use parakeet
         | for daily dictation like SuperWhisper?
        
       | msgodel wrote:
       | I still prefer festival, it's fast, it's in all the package
       | repos, and I don't like automations having realistic voices.
        
         | i80and wrote:
         | They're opposites: DeepSpeech is speech to text, where Festival
         | is TTS
        
       | quentindanjou wrote:
       | It seems that the team that used to work on DeepSpeech then
       | worked on coqui-ai STT https://github.com/coqui-ai/STT and now
       | recommends using OpenAI Whisper
       | (https://github.com/openai/whisper)
        
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