This is the biggest shortcoming of this project IMO; it only uses PocketSphinx to recognize the trigger phrase, and then uses Google STT for the command phrase.

A big reason I (and I believe others) are wary of Amazon Echo and Google Home are because we don't like the idea of having an always-on microphone in my home, shuttling everything my family says to these giant companies.

I really hope the MycroftAI-backed OpenSTT[1] project gets off the ground so they (and others) can divorce themselves from Amazon, Google, Bing, etc. services.

[1] https://openstt.org/

Good points. I also think we really should not label software "open source" unless it is really open source.

But good to see that at least the project has the intention of becoming open source.

It still relies on 3rd party proprietary STT- which is a huge problem for most of these speech interface projects.

The best results in the open-source STT field are accomplished using a library called Kaldi. However, it's a pain to set up an entire acoustic+phoneme+language model and harder still to run a continuous decoding server.

Luckily, a library [0] exists to accomplish this, which might provide an excellent replacement for Mycroft, provided some tweaks to the API.

[0] https://github.com/alumae/kaldi-gstreamer-server

It uses sphinx, which is open source:

It first detects its wake word using pocketsphinx on around the last two seconds of audio.

https://docs.mycroft.ai/overview