[HN Gopher] Leon: Open-source, self-hosted personal assistant ___________________________________________________________________ Leon: Open-source, self-hosted personal assistant Author : thunderbong Score : 188 points Date : 2022-09-04 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | leonroy wrote: | Uh-oh, did you have to call it Leon? | afro88 wrote: | But what can it actually do? | [deleted] | malermeister wrote: | How does this compare to some other open source, self hosted | assistants? | | rhasspy comes to mind, but i believe Mycroft can be self-hosted | too. | hungryotter wrote: | I've tried to self host myfcroft but after tinkering with it | for about 3-4 hours I gave up. They provide little to no | information for self hosting. Sure, you can use their pre-built | docker image but you still have to create an account in their | cloud and connect to it. And their privacy policy is not so | great imo. | joestrong wrote: | I did figure out how to do it at one point. I think you had | to remove some default config from a JSON file to stop it | connecting to their cloud. You still had to query Google | directly for the STT though | malermeister wrote: | I believe they hired the rhasspy dev though and he's been | trying to change this for the better. | | We'll see if he gets anywhere... | [deleted] | ttgurney wrote: | Looks like quite a lot of marketing put into this open-source | project. Heavyweight glossy website with trendy TLD, emojis | everywhere. Is this kind of thing typical in the JS world in | particular? Seriously asking. | | I'm trying to figure out what they are selling me, or what | megacorp they are associated with, but I don't see it yet. | IMcD23 wrote: | And yet, I set out to find what this thing can do. I read the | README. Today, the most interesting part is | about his core and the way he can scale up. He is pretty young | but can easily scale to have new features (skills). You can | find what he is able to do by browsing the packages list. | Sounds good for you? Then let's get started! | | The packages list is a dead link. https://github.com/leon- | ai/leon/tree/develop/packages | kenny87 wrote: | > The packages list is a dead link. https://github.com/leon- | ai/leon/tree/develop/packages | | From the blog ... | | "As of now, 'module' and 'packages' no longer exist. Instead, | they've been replaced by 'skills'." | | New link is https://github.com/leon- | ai/leon/tree/develop/skills | jimktrains2 wrote: | All those folders just contain a single json file with the | name of the skill category in it? I don't see any actual | features? | jrm4 wrote: | Right? I'm finding this problem everywhere. When checking out | new software, it's becoming more and more difficult to | determine what to do with "good looking marketing," and it | nearly cuts perfectly in roughly 3 ways; you're likely either a | dedicated whatever-size team making something great that | happens to have good marketing; you're a small team pushing | garbage and putting all your money in marketing, or you're a | megacorp (e.g. likely not great) | yewenjie wrote: | > Is this kind of thing typical in the JS world in particular? | | Yes, pretty common in the frontend world. | [deleted] | [deleted] | coscorrodrift wrote: | >Heavyweight glossy website with trendy TLD, emojis everywhere. | Is this kind of thing typical in the JS world in particular? | | yeah in frontend projects/dataviz stuff for sure | arisAlexis wrote: | This is overly suspicious. The guy made a nice effort and open | sources it. Would you prefer he had it closed source or sold | it? | fxtentacle wrote: | It's a showcase for a front-end framework. See the link at the | bottom. https://vercel.com/ | yunohn wrote: | Sure, but vercel has nothing to do with the UI look. It's a | framework for developing the overall application, not the | components or designs. | wetmore wrote: | Vercel is not a front-end framework. Also that's a | sponsorship link. | inezk wrote: | "Leon uses AI concepts, which is cool." - somehow this really | discouraged me from looking deeper into it. | denton-scratch wrote: | > somehow this really discouraged me from looking deeper into | it. | | I was also discouraged by that remark. But I've never had (or | even used) Alexa or Siri or whatever; they're a cool idea, but | I'm not prepared to rely on either of those sevice providers. | So I'm interested. | [deleted] | pvg wrote: | _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article or | post to complain about in the thread. Find something | interesting to respond to instead_ | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | ianbicking wrote: | It seems to be written by a young guy, English is his second | language, and he's excited to be learning different | technologies along the way. | titaniczero wrote: | English is his second language, I'd cut him some slack and | create a PR to fix it and help him instead of criticizing. | yupis wrote: | Thanks. Looks awesome. | pvg wrote: | A thread from 2019: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19152561 | hammyhavoc wrote: | Checked out the repository's homepage. Is it just me or do other | people hate the buzzword of "virtual brain"? | | Seems like everything is being described as that or a "second | brain" these days. | AlphaWeaver wrote: | Am I the only one freaked out by the focus on a Leon instance | setup unnecessarily framed as being "born" in their documentation | materials here? | | > $ leon create birth | | > At this stage, Leon is born and can already start to run via | this command: [...] | | It seems like an unnecessary anthropomorphization. | [deleted] | candiddevmike wrote: | Does it make you twice before you kill Leon or its children? | [deleted] | mdaniel wrote: | This probably was submitted due to their recent blog activity, in | which they talk about their NLP improvements: | https://blog.getleon.ai/a-much-better-nlp-and-future-1-0-0-b... | fxtentacle wrote: | self-hosted? | | "You are in control of your data. Leon lives on your server" | | Speech-to-Text: Google Cloud, IBM Watson, Coqui STT, Alibaba | Cloud (coming soon), Microsoft Azure (coming soon) | | So the AI assistant lives on my server, but if I want to have | good quality speech recognition, everything I say is sent through | a US cloud service. The only offline option, Coqui has a 7.5% | word error rate [1] on LibriSpeech test clean, which is worse | than Mozilla Deepspeech 2 from 2016 [2]. State of the art would | be around 1.4% [3], meaning 81% less errors than Coqui. | | [1] https://coqui.ai/blog/stt/deepspeech-0-6-speech-to-text- | engi... [2] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/deep-speech-2-end- | to-end-sp... [3] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/pushing-the- | limits-of-semi-... | [deleted] | j1elo wrote: | They might be interested in integrating Vosk, it's a speech-to- | text engine that is just a shared library (.so file on Linux) | and comes with API support for a variety of languages: | | https://alphacephei.com/vosk/ | | https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api | | Still, I've found that the Big players have much better | recognition models, and the post-processing that I assume they | do (grammatical, maybe syntactical inferences that improve the | end result) are probably much more powerful too. | spullara wrote: | There aren't any good speech-to-text models that are open | source. If you think there is one, please reply with a link. | The cloud ones are far superior. | jjulius wrote: | Right, and that's fine. The point is that if that's the case, | it's incredibly disingenuous to say that you are in control | of your own data if you use Leon. | prmoustache wrote: | That doesn't make it right to lie. | fxtentacle wrote: | I fully agree and I would love to change that. I mean my | company already funded work in that direction... but I sadly | predict that we won't have good open source real-time speech | recognition anytime soon. | | My napkin calculation is that you need about $100k for each | attempt at training a Conformer-Transducer. There's a pre- | trained NVIDIA model but it appears to have a bad choice of | hyperparameters and performance is much worse than what one | would expect based on research literature and I believe | you're not allowed to execute it on non-NVIDIA hardware. | | A skilled team will maybe need 5-10 attempts for discovering | a good set of hyperparameters. So the price to create the AI | model will likely be around $1 mio. But if you have such | large expenses, you have to plan things as a business | venture. And that means an open source release is highly | unlikely. | | (unless, of course, someone like stability.ai is happy to | bankroll 200 A100 GPUs for a few months each per target | language. In that case, please contact me) | RussianCow wrote: | I don't think the open source ones need to be superior to the | cloud ones, or even as good. If they come close enough for | the most common, let's say, 80% of use cases, that's good | enough for many people. | fxtentacle wrote: | Currently, they are like 5x the error rate, which is | significantly worse. | diceduckmonk wrote: | Those are beautiful animations / visual graphics on the landing | page. | | Awesome job! | Vaslo wrote: | Why would you take this over Mycroft? Is there a difference? | diroussel wrote: | Do you have a problem with that, Dave. | eterps wrote: | What are some obvious use cases for something like this? I really | have trouble imagining what you would use it for. | hackcasual wrote: | Most of my 30 something friends have ditched their Alexa's and | Google assistant devices because of concerns around security | and privacy. The ability to say "set a timer for 30 minutes" is | nice, but not enough to invite always on microphones into | private spaces | robertlagrant wrote: | > my 30 something friends | | That's a lot of friends! Good job. | nell wrote: | dad, is that you? | verdverm wrote: | Are you winning son? | kvirani wrote: | Wait what. When I hold the main button on android and say | exactly that, it means I have an always on microphone?? | qbit42 wrote: | The "always-on" microphone feature is used to listen for | "Okay Google", if you have that enabled. | kvirani wrote: | I see. So you can still use these assistants without the | privacy concern then. So why abandon? | bee_rider wrote: | If I have to hit a button to activate the voice | assistant, that removes use-cases like "my hands are full | but I want to turn on the smart lights" and "I'm cooking | and want a timer, but my hands are too dirty." These are | the use-cases where the tool really shines because it has | no competition. | | Without such a use-case, the tool gets put in the back- | of-mind. Sure it might be marginally easier to use than | swiping and poking, but my mental model of using the | phone is already swiping and poking. | MikeTheGreat wrote: | Disclaimer: I don't have one of these and don't | particularly want one. The privacy concerns kinda creep | me out. That said, I've been to friends homes and seen | them use it. | | As far as I can tell the primary use case for these | things is to be <random place in your home> and then just | say out loud "Alexa, set a timer for ....". I've heard | that you can order stuff from Amazon also using your | voice. I think a third use case starts with "Alexa, tell | me a joke". | | I'm assuming that there's other things you can do with | these (and would love to know, if anyone's willing to | share). | | So - if the solution to the privacy concern is to walk | over to the device and push a button then that seems to | remove most of the usefulness of the device. Speaking as | someone who doesn't want one / doesn't have one of these | things I can totally see how eliminating the "voice | control from anywhere" feature leads to opting out of it. | | (When I'm walking around my home I've always got my phone | on me (which, to be fair, has a bunch of privacy concerns | too) so I can more easily set a timer / buy something on | Amazon / Google for jokes by fishing my phone out of my | pocket and then using that, rather than walking over to | push a button.) | | (The "what else can you do with these" is a genuine | question - if people are comfortable sharing I'd love to | hear what you can do with these) | mod wrote: | I have Alexa, although I'm going to remove her and | replace with a locally-hosted thing. | | I've tied mine in with home automation stuff. So I can | turn on and off lights using voice, even if I'm not at | home. I sometimes forget to turn off my workshop and I | can do that from anywhere. | | I'd like to figure up a way to reset my internet, because | I access cameras, and it goes out sometimes. I'm very | sure this can be done. | | I also use her for weather, although I'm annoyed about | some of her limitations there, and I intend to get | exactly what I want by coding. I want to be able to ask | things like "when will it rain next", but Alexa can't do | that. | | She can also do reminders in a week or whatever, I use | that some. And I ask very simple questions that she can | query Google for, but honestly she's terrible at it. | | I also think she's too verbose, even with verbosity | turned down. She just goes on and on sometimes workout | being asked--like instructions on resetting the routers | if she can't contact Amazon. | | I also try Google assistant and Bixby. I use my watch for | a lot of the things you said you use your phone for. | | Anyway I'm not happy with any of them. I plan to work a | bunch on some skills as my next project, after the | current one is done. | hackcasual wrote: | There's a lot of little use cases. Hand free cooking | stuff (set a timer, home many tablespoons in a pint). | Device control, faster to turn off a TV with voice than | dig for the remote, or play a playlist/skip songs. None | of those really save that much more time than the old | fashion way, so concerns about privacy mean things get | done the old way. | | I know some people like having them in if they have | frailty or mobility concerns, which is probably the only | really new usecase. | revolvingocelot wrote: | That's just one of several privacy concerns. It's | possible to parse voice locally, as in TFA and eg | Mycroft('s open source, self-hosted version, anyway), but | for "some reason" mainstream assistants don't do it. | Sure, you can hold a button, and Google will only hear | about your timer request and nothing more, but some | people find the idea of Google knowing when you're | setting timers to be upsetting. Or at least worthy of | avoiding. | vineyardmike wrote: | They do actually do on device processing now... | | Siri, G Assistant, Alexa, Bixby, Sonos all perform at | least some locally. It seems the major issue is large | dictionaries (eg music libraries) or complex queries. | Most had an article about how basic features (times, | smart home) work entirely on device. | | [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22523438/apple- | iphone-siri... | | [2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/05/07/google- | assistant-... | | [3] https://www.amazon.science/blog/on-device-speech- | processing-... | | [4] https://www.xda-developers.com/samsung-bixby-will- | speed-up-r... | | [5] https://www.engadget.com/sonos-voice-control-music- | assistant... | mod wrote: | When my internet is out, Alexa won't even listen to me | (besides her name) | pseudalopex wrote: | Do any of them have a setting to enforce on device | processing only? | bergenty wrote: | When I used to use Alexa there were a lot of unexpected things | that came up and I used it atleast 15+ times a day. Things like | what's the weather like, what time is it, set a timer, unit | conversions, turn on/off lights or appliances, when is it going | to rain, factual google information, when was someone born, | what's the sports scores, I like trivia so it could ask you | questions while you were lounging around etc. and so many more | things to be honest. I stoped using it like 3 years ago though, | can't have an always on speaker in my house that sends all its | info back to Amazon, no matter what assurances they give me. | nextaccountic wrote: | Personal assistants can really make a difference to people with | disabilities | eterps wrote: | That's an excellent point, maybe something that should be | addressed on the site. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-04 23:00 UTC)