DeepSpeech Is Discontinued (2020)

I'd change it, except this submission is past the edit window. Perhaps dang or tomhow will see this and change it for me :)

> “Towards the end of 2004 I sent a note to somebody I knew here and saying that I was interested in anything that they might have and it turned out that Google was interested in Firefox. They liked the product and they thought it would be good to support its development, so eventually they hired myself and several other people from the Mozilla community to continue development on it.”

https://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php%3Fid=977.html

Presumably then Google developed a competing browser so they could collect more data and not come into constant conflict with Mozilla’s insistence on client-side-only data processing — but, as the interview above notes, the initial engagement appears to be because a coder suggested Google pay for Firefox development.

Has a nice sound to it but Hanlon's razor says: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. I'd be impressed if this was the case but I expect neither side is sufficiently competent or malicious to explain it.

I don't know if there's a direct quid pro quo relationship between the CEO of Mozilla and Google but I feel quite confident that Google absolutely influences the organization in ways beyond just the cash injection to make it rudderless, uncompetitive and shrinking as you say.

It could be as simple as ex-Google employees at lower levels than CEO who are paid by Google take positions at Mozilla, or more subtle things like guiding the direction of the organization through standards boards.

It would be really fascinating to look at the org charts of Mozilla past and present and try and build the network between people who worked at Google or Google related organizations before, during, and after their time at Mozilla.

Because you're absolutely right that the organization is so absolutely dysfunctional that it can't just be incompetence, it has to be absolute malice.

Look up for faster whisper or distilled whisper models, smaller models run quite nicely but perform poorly outside of English, if you are interested in a different language it's better to finetune it (HuggingFace has a huge amount of finetuned Whisper models).

If you want real-time, it requires a GPU, but can be underpowered. CPU is a little slower but works fine.

Best CPU TTS that can run on something like a raspberry pi is Piper. It can do real time synthesis on a raspberry pi and on a real computer it runs several times faster with negligible performance cost. I use it for 'reading' ebooks when my eyes get tired. The quality is roughly on par with where Mac OS's TTS was ~10 years ago (the last time I used it.) You can tell it's TTS, but it's good enough that you can become accustomed to it fairly easily.

https://github.com/rhasspy/piper

Sort of, check out https://github.com/senstella/parakeet-mlx.