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Comment by EntropyIsAHoax | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what it's used for imo. I've got the same setup and--apart from some sexism in the voice recognition--the basics work flawlessly. Once it's up and running it's trivial to set timers, check the weather, do basic unit conversions, etc...

Maybe once a month it freezes and it just needs to be restarted, anyone can do that who can get used to talking to a robot in the first place.

The more complicated stuff, I agree is not fit for people who aren't comfortable with a terminal. I also use it to control my lights and play spotify, but I'm only able to do that because I'm comfortable messing around with it and have the skills (and desire) to debug it when it breaks every other week.

It's nowhere near as polished as Alexa or similar, but it's good for the basics or for hobbyists who don't want to be spied on.

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> sexism in the voice recognition

What does this mean? Mycroft prefers taking orders from dudes?

Yes. It reliably responds to the wakeword ("hey Mycroft") from men, and only responds about 50% of the time to women.

When my sister visits, it almost never responded to her for example.

And in my personal experience, I used to have a very deep voice and it always responded to me. I decided I would rather have a more androgynous voice and did some voice training to accomplish that and use a pretty neutral pitch. Now it only responds to my normal voice about 50% of the time, so I intentionally drop my voice an octave whenever I speak to it.

But somehow it's not just about pitch either. I have friends who are trans men, and speak in a deep voice but they still have trouble getting Mycroft to respond.

OK, I see. Really interesting, but I guess not surprising. We talk a lot about inherent/implicit bias these days, and that's probably an example of it.

I wonder if the Mycroft project people are aware of the issue?

They are: https://mycroft.ai/blog/hey-mycroft-listen-to-me/

Although it hasn't gotten better from my perspective. But until I searched for this, I was totally unaware they've provided an easy way to train your own model for the wakeword! https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft-ai/customiz...

I will have to try that and if I remember I'll update here if it improves my situation in a few days

> It reliably responds to the wakeword ("hey Mycroft") from men, and only responds about 50% of the time to women.

They have instructions on how to train your own version of the wakeword listener.

https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-precise#train-your-own-...

Been looking for an open source tool like this for a while now - but to automate some home security stuff. All I need is good basic functionality anyways. So its good to know it at least works.

The sexism part is horse manure though. A strong accusation on a likely small team on tight deadlines and budgets who cannot cater to everyone all at once, like Big Tech and their massive resources and teams.

I don't mean to say the devs have any ill intent. Just pointing out the reality it has trouble with feminine voices. Like veidr points out in response to my comments, implicit bias is a big issue. Probably they originally trained the wakeword model entirely on American cis men, so naturally it has trouble recognizing any voice outside of that norm. It's not an accusation, this is a very well documented pitfall of machine learning.

I'm very grateful to the Mycroft team because I love smart speakers but am not willing to sacrifice my privacy to such a degree as I would have to to use a google home or Alexa or anything like that. That does not mean I won't point out its flaws.

This hardly sounds like sexism.

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