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Comment by mfester | Hacker News Reader

And I do invite you to try out our voice platform, running 100% on-device on Raspberry Pi 3 or equivalent (and soon MCUs). We're on par with Amazon, Google et al. in terms of performance:

- https://makers.snips.ai/

- https://github.com/snipsco/snips-nlu

- https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-nlu-is-an-open-source-priv...

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This demonstrates nicely that the "we need the cloud to do good voice analytics" argument is baloney. Local voice recognition is perfectly do-able, especially on today's hardware with today's cheap storage. They need the cloud to do bulk surveillance.

Oh I know, I've tried it and that's why I like what you guys have been doing. The missing piece of the puzzle is a decent hardware kit, but putting a blockchain on any of this is completely unnecessary.

Totally agree that we need decent, open hardware, and that's why we're set on building it :) This will take some time, but in the mean time, we've launched a "Maker Kit" (https://makers.snips.ai/kit/) so that everyone can get started building voice assistants for their home that don't listen in.

The blockchain is a key ingredient in what we are trying to build, that is, 100% private AI assistants. We will detail this in our upcoming white paper.

Oh I'm sure that a blockchain is a key ingredient, I'm just not sure why your blockchain is a key ingredient. There are thousands of other coins you can use here instead of fragmenting the space even more and spending development effort on yet another blockchain.

I know that the goal of your blockchain is "cash in on that sweet sweet ICO hype", I just wish you either didn't or that you were more upfront about it.

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