Voice assistant on Linux?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Hi,

Mycroft has its smart speaker as well, called Mark II:

https://mycroft.ai/product/mark-ii/


I've pre-ordered one myself, should be shipped sometimes in September.

I'm pretty curious what will it be capable of. I certainly couldn't run
a proprietary device like Amazon Echo or Google Home here, I've read an
article on what kinds of things do Amazon engineers hear on the
diagnostics recordings, and it was enough to me not to trust any
constantly listening microphone that is not open-source.


Mycroft works completely offline in this regard, so that's finally
something I can trust.


Though, I wonder, did anyone read their license terms and privacy policy?

Well, I did, and I'm not sure whether it's just me, but from my
understanding of what I've read there, basically, nothing of the privacy
stuff they claim on their website - private voice recognition, private
commands processing, voluntary telemetry etc.

is really anchored in their privacy policy. In fact, even the opposite
in some regards.

For example, what is this?


"**When you use our Services including the Mycroft Voice Assistant, your
voice and audio commands are transmitted to our Servers for processing.**"


Isn't the exact opposite one of their main selling points?


And the section right below:


"* The Information We Collect About You
* Registration and Account Profile
* Voice Commands"


Source: https://mycroft.ai/embed-privacy-policy/


Honestly, I tend to read licenses from time to time, just to see what am
I agreeing to.

And this is one of the worst privacy policies I've ever seen. Could very
well be called just tracking policy, since it seems to be designed only
to protect them for cases of any data collection reveals.


Their general license terms are similarly rubberish, defending more the
company than its customers.

Though, in this case, I can actually understand it, some people are
willing to sue companies for completely ridiculous reasons, so it's good
for a startup to have a solid defense for such cases.


But the privacy policy would be really poor even for an average company,
speak of one that's literally based on privacy.


Ah...


Regardless, I hope this is just a product of lawiers who don't
understand technology and data stuff very well.

Hopefully open-source software will protect us from shady practices.

This is one of the many advantages of OSS. Licenses are just words, but
if architecture is open (what should be the case with Mycroft), it
should be possible to verify what is each part doing and if it's doing
it right.


i wanted to play with the speech recognition modules anyway, since I
wanted to try out what NVIDIA's NeMo could pull of in a speaker like
this, so we'll see.


Best regards


Rastislav


Dňa 25. 2. 2022 o 20:30 Linux for blind general discussion napísal(a):
> I thought I remembered someone telling me that you could install Alexa
> using Snap, but I also remember it being somewhat experimental or something.
>
>
> Yes, I also have a couple of Alexa devices, I just keep them out of
> bedrooms and bathrooms, what I consider to be the most private parts of
> the house. They stay in the livingroom and kitchen, where they are most
> useful at any rate.
>
> ~Kyle
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list at redhat.com
> https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>