Mozilla's Incredible Speech-To-Text Engine Is At Risk Following Layoffs

[pal666]

And I know a lot of people who share my opinion.

and i know that 85% of people prefer android instead of your opinion

[pal666]

We need to figure this out somehow. I mean, it's great that we have non-profit and volunteer FOSS projects, but if we want commercial quality FOSS, then it has to be financed somehow.

mozilla is non-profit btw

[pal666]

Lets ensure that we have good standards for the web, so that a page would work much the same with many browsers.

too often i have firefox rendering pages incorrectly so that i have to use chromium on them

[tildearrow]

There are some good alternatives around, even better than DeepSpeech. Vosk for example supports 10 languages, works offline on Android and RPi with small 50Mb model and allows to configure grammar on the fly. Based on the testing I just did with Vosk, Mozilla DeepSpeech, Google Speech to Text and Microsoft Azure, I disagree with your arugment that SaaS has the best quality results.

Mozilla DeepSpeech was definitely trailing the bleeding edge, but Vosk using the vosk-model-en-us-daanzu-20200328 model produces very accurate results even on uncommon words, similar in performance to Google & Microsoft (which has generally better formatting than Google's STT)

Try it yourself:

Google: https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/ See "Put Speech-to-Text into action" header

Microsoft: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service... See "Upload File"

Vosk: https://alphacephei.com/vosk/

Had Mozilla provided 4x to 8x more GPU resources and more staff, then their STT would likely be competitive. Other small STT developers can iterate and test much faster due to having more hardware at their disposal.

Really?! o-o

How come Vosk/Kaldi doesn't get a lot of publicity then? I've tried the Android demo and it works better than I expected, and honestly I am surprised because this is open-source...

[bug77]

Not in my experience, and my Android hardware is pretty powerful. But my main gripe, as I said, is the entire OS experience and workflow. It doesn't have to be super smooth if the OS is at least nice to work with. I had that with webOS on my Pre 3: it was smooth enough, but not iOS-like smooth, but the OS was absolutely perfect otherwise, so "smooth enough" was good enough for me.

Get a Pixel or an Android One device. Don't judge Android by the crap third parties pre-install.

As for confusing, I guess that's in the eye of the beholder. I found iOS' lack of a back button more confusing than all of Android's quirks put together.

[piotrj3]

I don't understand why Mozilla's management focuses on profitability via niche products. I have the feeling that the issue related to not being able to incentivize on products is because of bad management choices. Why not focus on stuff where Mozilla is a leader in: the web. Sell web dev trainings, offering consulting services around web devving/strategies etc., offering web dev services,... The web is what people know where Mozilla is REALLY strong and were they have a dominant brand position over many other providers. But no, let's focus on selling a vpn product instead and hope those 1337 people switch their solid VPN service for ours and non-tech people decide to use VPN services 'cause of privacy

You mostly hit nail in the head, although I think VPN is kind of good idea. Who i gonna trust some random company that claims to not store logs or Mozilla... Well i think Mozilla gets a lot more trust here. But web dev trainings or Rust training etc. would be amazing from Mozilla and lots of companies would gladly pay big money to them for that.

[creoflux]

I donated money in the past to Mozilla but stopped after there was a story from Bryan Lunduke about them awarding $100,000 to fund RiseUp.Net. I think encrypted e-mail is a good goal but the overt political nature of RiseUp.Net and association with far-left anarchists did not make me feel great. I think their support for open standards and documentation are great. I just wish they would disassociate themselves from any political messaging.

[Michael_S]

I understand, but Google obviously advertises its products, before Chrome there was IE that was the master.
In the period of IE's dominance, the average user thought the IE symbol meant the web, they were forced to do a massive marketing campaign if they wanted to oust IE. In the end it was a benefit for everyone, today most of the web technologies are open source and we are finally getting rid of Flash. In many cases Mozilla worked alongside Google to enforce open formats.

There is more to it, but I think the important thing is that when Firefox beat IE and when Chrome beat Firefox, the newcomer was much faster and more stable than the incumbent.

I don't even think that's true any more, at arewefastyet.com one of the benchmarks Firefox routines every day is the page load times of the 20 most popular websites on the internet, and Firefox beats Chrome in a lot of them. But Firefox is old news, users don't care, and Mozilla doesn't have the money to put into marketing Firefox at a level that would compete with Google's marketing for Chrome.

Likewise, for people that don't care about software freedom I imagine the new version of Edge is just as good as Chrome. But again, it's too late and users won't care. (Edit: Not that I want people to move to Edge, I think Microsoft is only currently less evil than Google by virtue of being less competent at data harvesting. But my point is that Firefox can't beat Chrome for the same reason Edge can't, the advantages just aren't big enough to get the users' attention.)

[Charlie68]

Mozilla made a lot of bad choices in the past twelve years, but the key thing is that between technical excellence and massive promotion marketing campaigns, Chrome started eating away at Firefox's market share by millions of users per month early on and never stopped.

I think the Mozilla leaders just started flailing around desperately trying to find ways to keep Firefox relevant.

Yes they made a lot of dumb decisions - for example I love what FirefoxOS was trying to do, but clearly it was a poor investment of their resources. But I doubt many other leaders could have done better if they were put in charge of Firefox.

I understand, but Google obviously advertises its products, before Chrome there was IE that was the master.
In the period of IE's dominance, the average user thought the IE symbol meant the web, they were forced to do a massive marketing campaign if they wanted to oust IE. In the end it was a benefit for everyone, today most of the web technologies are open source and we are finally getting rid of Flash. In many cases Mozilla worked alongside Google to enforce open formats.

[Michael_S]

I think Mozilla has made wrong choices, that together with the difficult period we are all experiencing is in difficulty, blaming others for their own misfortunes is absurd.

Mozilla made a lot of bad choices in the past twelve years, but the key thing is that between technical excellence and massive promotion marketing campaigns, Chrome started eating away at Firefox's market share by millions of users per month early on and never stopped.

I think the Mozilla leaders just started flailing around desperately trying to find ways to keep Firefox relevant.

Yes they made a lot of dumb decisions - for example I love what FirefoxOS was trying to do, but clearly it was a poor investment of their resources. But I doubt many other leaders could have done better if they were put in charge of Firefox.