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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

"But it’s sort of funny considering hardly any of Google’s other products work offline. Are you going to dictate into a shared document while you’re offline? Write an email? Ask for a conversion between liters and cups? You’re going to need a connection for that!"

While offline, you might write email drafts, your blog, or even a book:

https://medium.com/@augustbirch/what-i-learned-writing-an-en...

What's missing is the ability to make edits using your phone. You can probably speak at over 100 words a minute but then you need to stop to bring up the software keyboard.

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The offline aspect is hardly the main draw here though. As mentioned earlier in the article, the latency reduction is huge. Another aspect they didn't really cover is privacy implications. Lastly, you may not be offline, but dodgy connections can also be a pain if you need a stable stream of packets going back and forth.

I refuse to put an amazon/apple/google surveillance device in my home, so I am very interested in a DIY digital assistant device. I'm aware of a few options but it seems like offline voice recognition is always a little sub-par. I am really looking forward to the day when an offline, open source digital assistant can compare in quality to a proprietary/cloud device.

https://github.com/leon-ai/leon

> I refuse to put an amazon/apple/google surveillance device in my home...

Do you have a smartphone? Because that's most likely an Apple or Google surveillance device.

https://github.com/NaomiProject/Naomi

It shouldn't be offline, using recognition online but at your own cloud would be the way too.

uh, "cloud" isn't a magical thing that has specialized hardware for voice recognition. It is just a computer. Just like the device you have locally. So if the device locally can run the NN then there is no need to have a "cloud" do it. You only add latency.

On-demand Xeon with GPU in the cloud is quite different from local ESP32.

>As mentioned earlier in the article, the latency reduction is huge.

Well, on macOS offline voice recognition is actually much slower than online. Not to mention the choice of words and Vocab is quite limited. I love to get an offline version, but so far every online version seems to be better.

I don't think that means this one will be slower. Google has always been the leader in the voice recognition field. I'll bet they'll do offline processing better than Apple.

>Google has always been the leader in the voice recognition field

Interestingly may be only for English. In my experience Apple is doing far better in Japanese, Chinese ( Both Mandarin and Cantonese )

FWIW Google Translate (including the "translate from picture" feature) is an example of a product that has had offline option for quite some time. You have to tell it to download for each language pair IIRC.

Can't wait for different language models to be available to download for recognition, so one could have a genuine offline dictation between languages.

Offline voice-to-voice translation would pretty damn useful.

For the record it wasn't always this way, the last couple of years though they have made a lot of improvements on this front. I think it may have something to do with Google's "next billion of devices" being in countries with bad connectivity.

With that said I especially like the Google Maps offline features which have been added recently. You can even have it calculate driving directions completely offline if you have the starting and ending addresses.

Google Maps has an excellent offline mode on iOS and Android. I wish Apple Maps had that too.

If only it didn't force-expire downloaded maps after a while...

I get updates every 30 days. Do they expire if you don’t update?

Yes

That's stupid. I do offline maps mainly for the times when I don't have a good connection. It makes no sense to lose the maps when you are spending an extended amount of time off-grid. That's exactly when you need offline maps.

License issues. Wouldn't happen if all the data was OpenStreetMap and Google data only.

I suspect very very few people pay to have a smart phone and don't get it on WAN or wifi at least once a month.

If I remember correctly, the maps aren't auto-updated by default; you do get notifications, but those are too easy to ignore (esp. since Maps is chatty in general).

And then for someone on an expensive metered or slow connection - which is a lot of people in the developing countries - they might not want auto-update at all. So if they didn't notice expiration, they'll find out that their maps aren't there next time they try to navigate offline.

My offline maps expire in years, not in months or weeks. I'm not sure that's a huge issue, roads change over time and eventually maps will be so old that they are harmful.

On my Pixel 3 it's more like a month. All expired in the next few weeks, when I updated one it moved the expiration date to 4 weeks into the future.

I get a popup/notification once a month or so, when on wifi. It just asks if I want an update. There are settings to automatically update offline maps and one to control the automatic downloading of offline maps.

Seems pretty reasonable to me, after all roads do change over time.

My main motivation is to make nav less bandwidth intensive (I pay per GB with Google FI) and to ensure I have maps even if I don't have a good data connection.

It's reasonable to warn and suggest to update. It's not reasonable to not allow to use the old maps just because you don't update - but the Maps app enforces that.

It might have something to do with licensing. Either way, OsmAnd doesn't have that problem.

It's one of those features that makes one think... Why am I being notified about this at all? Can't this be taken care of without my input?

I am being notified but the process starts automatically. No input needed.

Why bother you then?

Yes, there's two settings in maps under offline maps. You can set it to auto update and download if you wish.

Most of their products work offline and sync when a connection is regained. That includes Google Docs and Gmail.

It means google doesn't need to pay for all the servers busy doing speech recognition. They shifted that work to the user's device.

It's hilarious how they can't do anything right. If it's in the cloud it's evil because Google, if it happens on device it's evil because Google.

Who said it's evil?

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