Personal cloud virtual assistant

[cobrakiller58]

I have a dream. I have a dream that one day my virtual assistant won't suddenly stop working because some large corp decided they want more information about me, one day my virtual assistant will store my data on my FreeNAS or TrueNAS (one day) I like Siri, I like Google Now I even almost like Cortana but I don't like the fact that everything I link to them is sent to.... who? I was enjoying the convenience of google now then one update it mysteriously stopped working when I poked around its settings it had been changed to essential stop working if your location data was disabled. Have I missed a virtual assistant you can host on your own equipment? Considering the nature of some business's there HAS to be someone working on it right.....? Silent Circle and BlackBerry are both kicking the privacy and security marketing horse yet I have not seen them touch the subject (I may have missed somethings however)

 

[tvsjr]

Not going to happen. The amount of data required to make all that work (the linguistics processing, the neural algorithms to provide answers to questions, etc.) ain't gonna happen on your PC at home. Unless you're willing to build your own HPC cluster and write all the code.

 

[cobrakiller58]

Writing code is outta my league at the moment but I definitely feel like there will be a market for such a thing in the not too distant future. Probably not so much for home users but medium to large companies, I've seen at least one open source project but it doesn't appear to give you the ability to handle everything on private servers. I'm curious just how much computing power is required per user.

 

[danb35]

I'm thinking the computing power per user wouldn't be too great, but the amount of code that's needed would be substantial. But that's a big part of why I don't have an Alexa/Google Home/Homepod--I don't want Amazon/Google/Apple potentially listening to everything going on in my home. It'd be nice to have comparable self-hosted functionality.

 

[tvsjr]

Y'all haven't talked to many teenagers, haven't you? Most kids think Google/Alexa/etc. are wonderful and don't even begin to understand the privacy implications. I actually expect to see a dramatic reduction in the amount of "self-hosted" stuff over the next few decades.

 

[danb35]

don't even begin to understand the privacy implications

That's true of an awful lot of adults as well, unfortunately.

I actually expect to see a dramatic reduction in the amount of "self-hosted" stuff over the next few decades.

I'm afraid you're right, but hope you're wrong.

 

[cobrakiller58]

I'm thinking the computing power per user wouldn't be too great, but the amount of code that's needed would be substantial.

I was just looking at Dragon SDK and the hardware requirements were not very high which make me think it would be doable on most of the hardware we run FreeNAS on.

I actually expect to see a dramatic reduction in the amount of "self-hosted" stuff over the next few decades.

I truly hope there are some inspired programmers that can slow this shift. I remember reading an article stating that personal clouds were desired by quiet a few people (still a VERY small percentage of over all users of the cloud) but were few and far between for varies reasons.

 

[tvsjr]

In many cases, the algorithms really aren't that hard. Training the network, however, is a different story. Why do you think Google does things like offer Google Voice for free? Go read the T&Cs. You'll discover they're allowed to record and process all that data... thus providing them with zillions of hours of all kinds of voices to help tune their linguistic algorithms. Waze is free because it gives them a ton of traffic and road data to learn from. Translate, same. Gmail? Oh yes, they're using that data too.

Unfortunately, making this sort of stuff work well is hard, and takes lots of data and thus lots of people. But, having all that data means you can also do lots of nefarious things... and people who want to do nefarious things also happen to have money. So, the old "don't be evil" thing goes out the window quickly.

The sad part is the number of people who rely on these services. Let's say Google, Microsoft, and Apple decided to yank our collective chains all at once (or got hit by an injunction from some patent/IP issue). Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps all go away simultaneously... plus all of the products that rely on them to function. How much of the population would be able to successfully navigate?