Hacker News Reader

Comment by oneeyedpigeon | Hacker News Reader

I was waiting for this comment. What's the alternative? No voice-recognition? Voice recognition that only runs client-side and lacks all the advantages a centralised service can provide?An equivalent provided by someone else that, for whatever reason, you trust more than Google?

Edit: I didn't downvote you, though, and I've upvoted to counteract whoever did. The point you're raising can clearly contribute to an interesting discussion.

View on HN

> Voice recognition that only runs client-side and lacks all the advantages a centralised service can provide?

By the way, my impression from talking to someone in the know was that Google has been developing client-side voice recognition that is only a about couple of years behind their cloud voice recognition in quality. (The client-side service still requires the huge amounts of voice data to be used to train the software, but it can run offline on a cell phone processor.) Right now being two years behind in quality is quite noticeable, but that will change soon once quality plateaus near perfect, and client-side voice recognition will make sense again.

Just rumors though.

My prediction is client side voice recognition, as good as this, in >2 years.

Powered either by mobile GPU's and more efficient ML algorithms than we currently have, or specialist chips like http://www.movidius.com/

I understand that my comment makes people uncomfortable as in "ha this is the typical anti-Google-paranoid guy". I respect that, and I used a specifically skeptic tone on purpose.

I love Google, they make great products, but at the same time I can't help being afraid of this marvelous monster.

Oh, I hear you. Part of me totally shares your concern, and - just like pretty much anyone else - I wouldn't want Google recording everything I say into my microphone. But that's pure speculation right now; let's wait until we know whether or not they're actually doing that, or until someone's at least gone through the Ts&Cs with a fine toothcomb.

https://history.google.com/history/audio

>What's the alternative? No voice-recognition? Voice recognition that only runs client-side and lacks all the advantages a centralised service can provide?

Distributed, self-hosting would be far safer than having all of your most personal information owned by a remote centralized authority.

The alternative would be for Google to take end-to-end encryption seriously, even for their databases, so even they can't access most of the information gathered from the users.

But they haven't even done that for Hangouts yet, let alone for their databases.

If the voice recognition were strictly client-side, I might actually be willing to try it. The advantages of a centralized service would appear to accrue largely to the centralizer.

Thanks for the edit. It is quite amusing to see the up and down votes going, my karma keeps moving but stays about the same. Maybe I should have been even more sarcastic!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com