philipp2310

Thank you, my first thought was a mixture of umbrella corp and the scanner drones from half life 2 :)

I put it up for discussion. We don't want to cling to our current design, but we aren't sure yet about a good way to approach a redesigns. Needs a bit time to decide what aspects of Alice in total should be redesigned

I always wondered if Alice Cooper is doing that for multiple radio stations :) A local German radio station (Radio Bob) has a weekly show with him as well. I guess the same prerecorded stuff with a few custom "you are listening to..." mixed in!

Regarding "just to pay some celebrity".. well, that is currently way out of our budget, as everything offered so far is 100% free and there are no plans to change that :)

This - plus the skills icons can be chosen freely from font-awesome in skill creation. Maybe we should exclude fa-brand space from the allowed icons. Another good hint, thank you! And yep, the team dearly misses some creative heads for design as everybody involved is from the coding area :)

yeah, was quite shocked when I learned about yandex' Alice..

To be fair: Project Alice is older than yandex Alice and there is nothing but the name connecting these two assistants!

sadly no. CoquiTTS integration was in the making, where you have some voice cloning features, but I had to delay it, as it required some newer versions(python 3.9) and I think it was 64bit only.

Currently you got the following choice: Pico, Mycroft, Google Standard/Wavenet, Amazon, IBM Watson

And while using one of the cloud variants might cause security concerns, keep in mind, they will only know what to speak, not why (e.g. what your input/request was)

true words, thank you. While the projects logo/name exists longer than I'm in the project, I had my thoughts about it as well.

I came to the conclusion, there are so many car stickers/unlicensed merch or even companies with a similar logo, there shouldn't be an issue for a small open source project. Maybe a dangerous conclusion, that should be revised when Alice grows :)

For the moment, no, nothing is cached until the hotword is recognized. We thought about it though, but it would mean we have to store passed sound input for a few seconds. While this won't be a problem for the main device, satellites aren't power full enough to run ASR them selfes (Raspi Zero), so the sound is streamed to the main device after the hotword detection. This process wouldn't match perfectly with the storing of the data.

Another thing to keep in mind is, we use intermediate results for the ASR. Means already while you are speaking, the input is parsed. Only a few ms after you go silent, the parsing is finalized and NLU/TTS will start right away.

Of course with a bit bias, I'd say it is more like: "Hey Alice" "Yes?.." "What's gonna be the weather at 11 tomorrow?" short pause (.2 seconds?) <answer>

Alice offers a few different STT options. While you can stay completely offline, depending on the language and your background noise, indeed the results are not as perfect as the cloud ones. But especially coqui STT (former deepspeech) does a really good job!

Another option, if you are a bit more open with "sharing" data and you don't want to miss out the best TTS, is enabling google or azure cloud services - with the big difference, Alice will only send the sound right after detecting your hotword (only while flashing her LED and asking you "yes?" before the recording starts). Nothing else would be shared.

dev here (quite overwhelmed by all the new visitors coming from here, thank you all!): My wife doesn't like female assistants either, for us Alice got a male voice and we just pretend it is Alice Cooper ;)