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Re:Google Home by dgacmu on Thursday May 19, 2016 @12:01AM (#11727868)
"In restricted grammar mode"

That's a key limitation, though.

But we're getting close to the point where you can do some of this. For example - http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.03185.pdf - LSTM speech recognition running on a Nexus 5.

The more serious problem with this is that it's going to be expensive -- and somewhat wasteful. There's a lot of pressure to keep consumer devices as cheap as possible, and the cloud is an awesome way to do that. Having shared cloud-based infrastructure for the speech recognition as opposed to putting it into every device (even though it's only used for ~5 minutes every day) is probably a lot cheaper. Consider the hardware in an Amazon Echo:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Teardown/33953

256MB DRAM and a TI DSP: http://www.ti.com/product/dm3725 with a single Cortex-A8 core (about $23 + a smidgeon for the dram)

vs. a Nexus 5 (2GB DRAM, 4 core 2.2Ghz Krait 400) -- the N5 has roughly 8x the DRAM and compute of the CPU in the Echo.

Would you pay an extra $150 for a LocalEcho that still had to send most of your queries to a search engine for resolution, or to a cloud music service for music? (You & I might, but most consumers wouldn't.)

Re:Google Home by pmlnr on Thursday May 19, 2016 @06:21AM (#11729146)
> "In restricted grammar mode"

> That's a key limitation, though.

Why would it be? Sophisticated exchange of theorems and not essential for this scenario, is it?

Re:Google Home by michaelt on Thursday May 19, 2016 @09:24AM (#11729966)
Depends if you want to support things like "OK Google, invite Pawel Moczydłowski to my barbecue" and "OK Google, how do you spell d'Artagnan?"