Thinking about how Mozilla is "pivoting to AI" but DeepSpeech, one of the very few "AI" products you could possibly find a positive use for (pure-local speech recognition), is not only a Mozilla product but so abandoned that you actually have to downgrade to Python 3.9 to run it
Like, I saw a post complaining that everyone simultaneously loves Firefox's pure-local translation library but everyone is also complaining about Firefox "refocusing" on AI, and that is a fair point, but also to me if a company/org announces they are going to focus on "AI" that is a statement that they are only going to be exploring the least useful, most damaging forms of "AI". If they intended to do something good, they'd probably call it something other than "AI"
@mcc I think that's entirely right. If you have a positive use for a tool, you boast about the use. If not, you boast about the tool.
It's like "gun culture" folks who will say "a gun is just a tool". A shovel is a tool but there aren't "shovel culture" folks, there are a gardeners. A handsaw is a tool but there aren't "handsaw culture" folks, there are carpenters.
You can tell the folks for whom a gun really is just a tool, because they talk about hunting trips.
Current status: Apparently the claims it supports Python 3.9 or lower actually means "supports 3.9 or lower on linux". If you want to run it on Windows you need Python 3.7 or lower. OK
@mcc i don’t really know the whole story, but one of the creators of deepspeech went on to contribute to https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS which seems to be the actively maintained successor to it
@mcc@actualwitch Almost all the DeepSpeech team (including the tech lead Kelly Davis) left Mozilla to start Coqui. Unfortunately that didn't work and they had to close shop recently.
@mcc had a Mozilla rep at linux.conf.au (rip) in 2019. Did a great workshop on their local home automation gateway. Very privacy first, showed off the speech recognition with local processing, I got to play with setting it up using WebThings and speech instructions.
I remember her quote to the audience that "Mozilla will always be your friend". In an increasingly hyper capitalist web I do at least know Mozilla's core mission is to enable and empower users with technology choice and capabilities
@mcc while I absolutely don't love every path they go down, or disinvestment in projects that have imo real lasting value, they do seem to be trying to see where new things emerge and act as an incubator for guiding that emergence in ways that are better for real people.
I love my Mozilla email aliases and my Mozilla browser and Mozilla email client! I'm really happy with my Mozilla browser built in translation tools.
I'd still use Mozilla tech before I tried Meta tech or Google tech, for sure
@JLab8 I had like a ten year period I was fixed on Python 2.7 and it was great. Somewhere upgrade chaos was happening to 3.x users and I was just stuck on my old version that everybody kept trying to support (for a while)
Add comment