<story><title>Google Home</title><url>http://home.google.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>How would you make it self-hosted without making it suck? High quality voice recognition in a small box doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be a thing that&amp;#x27;s even remotely possible today, let alone the query processing and knowledge database that comes with it.&lt;p&gt;You &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; build this on a pi with a mic, speakers, some foss stt and tts engines and some basic training data. But it&amp;#x27;ll suck.</text></item><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>I have only two wishes:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform...&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s one. The second one is, please make it self-hosted. No cloud bullshit.&lt;p&gt;I know I&amp;#x27;ll probably never live to see the second one coming true.</text></item><item><author>t0mbstone</author><text>Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform...&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to control my Apple TV with my Google Home device.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to control my Phillips Hue and LiFX bulbs.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to build my own custom home automation server endpoints and point my Google Home commands at them.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to remote start my car with a voice command.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to control my Harmony remote, and all of the devices connected to my Harmony hub.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to access my Google calendar.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to make hands-free phone calls to anyone on my Google contacts.&lt;p&gt;If my grandmother falls, I want her to be able to call 911 by talking to the Google Home device.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to ask wolfram alpha questions by voice.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to have a back-and-forth conversation to arrive at a conclusion. I don&amp;#x27;t want to have to say a perfectly formulated command like, &amp;quot;Add an event to my calendar on Jan 1, 2016 at 2:00 pm titled go to the pool party&amp;quot;. I want to be able to say, &amp;quot;Can you add an event to my calendar?&amp;quot;, and then answer a series of questions. I hate having to formulate complex commands as a single sentence.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to have a Google Home device in each room, without having to give each one its own wake-up word. Just have the closest one to me respond to my voice (based on how well it can hear me).&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to play music on all of my Google Home devices at the same time, and have the music perfectly synchronized.&lt;p&gt;This is my wish list. I am currently able to do more than half of these items with Amazon Echo, but I had to do a bunch of hacking and it was a pain in the ass.&lt;p&gt;If Google Home can deliver on these points, I would switch from Amazon Echo in a heartbeat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>Ten years ago I played with Microsoft Speech API - which was completely off-line and trained off your voice. In restricted grammar mode, it worked flawlessly - I built a music control application on it, and utilized it like you would use Amazon Echo - I just said &amp;quot;computer, volume, three quarters&amp;quot; from any place in the room, and the &lt;i&gt;loud&lt;/i&gt; music turned down a notch. Etc. That was &lt;i&gt;ten years ago&lt;/i&gt;, with a crappy electret microphone I soldered to a cable myself and sticked to my wardrobe with a bit of insulating tape.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not buying you couldn&amp;#x27;t make a decent, self-contained, off-line speech recognition system. Sure, it may not be &lt;i&gt;as&lt;/i&gt; good as Echo or Google Now (though the latter does suck hardly at times, it&amp;#x27;s nowhere near reliable to use, and it doesn&amp;#x27;t understand shit over a &lt;i&gt;quite good and expensive&lt;/i&gt; Bluetooth headset). But it would be hackable, customizable. You could make it do some actual work for you.&lt;p&gt;Oh, and it wouldn&amp;#x27;t lag so terribly as Google Now does. Realtime applications and data over mobile networks don&amp;#x27;t mix.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Home</title><url>http://home.google.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>How would you make it self-hosted without making it suck? High quality voice recognition in a small box doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be a thing that&amp;#x27;s even remotely possible today, let alone the query processing and knowledge database that comes with it.&lt;p&gt;You &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; build this on a pi with a mic, speakers, some foss stt and tts engines and some basic training data. But it&amp;#x27;ll suck.</text></item><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>I have only two wishes:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform...&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s one. The second one is, please make it self-hosted. No cloud bullshit.&lt;p&gt;I know I&amp;#x27;ll probably never live to see the second one coming true.</text></item><item><author>t0mbstone</author><text>Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform...&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to control my Apple TV with my Google Home device.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to control my Phillips Hue and LiFX bulbs.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to build my own custom home automation server endpoints and point my Google Home commands at them.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to remote start my car with a voice command.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to control my Harmony remote, and all of the devices connected to my Harmony hub.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to access my Google calendar.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to make hands-free phone calls to anyone on my Google contacts.&lt;p&gt;If my grandmother falls, I want her to be able to call 911 by talking to the Google Home device.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to ask wolfram alpha questions by voice.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to have a back-and-forth conversation to arrive at a conclusion. I don&amp;#x27;t want to have to say a perfectly formulated command like, &amp;quot;Add an event to my calendar on Jan 1, 2016 at 2:00 pm titled go to the pool party&amp;quot;. I want to be able to say, &amp;quot;Can you add an event to my calendar?&amp;quot;, and then answer a series of questions. I hate having to formulate complex commands as a single sentence.&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to have a Google Home device in each room, without having to give each one its own wake-up word. Just have the closest one to me respond to my voice (based on how well it can hear me).&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to play music on all of my Google Home devices at the same time, and have the music perfectly synchronized.&lt;p&gt;This is my wish list. I am currently able to do more than half of these items with Amazon Echo, but I had to do a bunch of hacking and it was a pain in the ass.&lt;p&gt;If Google Home can deliver on these points, I would switch from Amazon Echo in a heartbeat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mbrock</author><text>Hey, people with experience in speech recognition, please chime in!&lt;p&gt;Just the other day I was looking at CMU&amp;#x27;s Sphinx project for speech recognition. It seems quite capable, even of building something like this Google thing, but I haven&amp;#x27;t tried to actually use it.&lt;p&gt;Large-vocabulary recognition probably needs something better than a Raspberry Pi... so, just use a more powerful CPU.&lt;p&gt;Yes, Google has an incomprehensibly enormous database of proprietary knowledge and information. Good for them! If we want to build a home assistant that doesn&amp;#x27;t depend on Google, we&amp;#x27;ll have to make tradeoffs. That doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it has to suck.</text></comment>