Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DeepSpeech-At-Risk

by lisper • 6 years ago

132 73 6 years ago

suby4• 6 years ago

Semi-related, but does anyone know if Firefox Send is on the chopping block? They took it down before the layoffs due to security concerns, and now I'm worried it won't be coming back online.

Every alternative I've been able to find has been either poor quality or too shady for me to ever actually want to use.

DHPersonal• 6 years ago

I just started renting my own cloud storage space for moments like this.

Mandatum2• 6 years ago

Not given priority right now - it's getting abused by malware authors. Confirmed via Mozilla IRC.

You can set it up yourself really easily (got it running locally on Mac in 5 mins), throw an auth'd gateway in front of it to keep it away from bad actors: https://github.com/mozilla/send

wavesquid• 6 years ago

I thought mozilla irc was shut down?

gruez• 6 years ago

Every alternative I've been able to find has been either poor quality or too shady for me to ever actually want to use.

have you tried https://catbox.moe/ (or others https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Pomf.se/Clones)? Not sure what you mean by "shady", but most of them provide a direct download without any interstitials.

sbierwagen• 6 years ago

I've mostly heard of people using Magic Wormhole for this https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole Never used it myself

aembleton• 6 years ago

That works great for sending files between my machines or to other technically minded people, but Firefox send was useful to send to others.

Yetanfou2• 6 years ago

I don't know if Mozilla plans to bring it back but I know the solution is just around the corner: host it yourself. If you only want to do things like this you could use any SBC - Raspberry Pi etc - running some distribution of some operating system you prefer - Linux, *BSD, etc - hanging off your own internet connection. Either run something cloudy - Nextcloud, Owncloud, Syncthing, Seafile - or find (or make) a program made for this purpose. Get a domain name, use dynamic DNS to keep that name pointing at your IP and you're done - welcome to the world of self-hosted services.

Now that you've made a start you'll probably find you start adding services to that box under the stairs. Why pay for Dropbox when you can use your very own box with far more storage for far less money? Run something like Airsonic and you can stream your own media. Instead of having Xi Jinping watching your goldfish through that IP camera you can put the thing in a dedicated network zone, run a VPN on the box and make the camera only accessible through that VPN. The possibilities are close to endless, the costs are low and coming down all the time, power consumption can be negligible if you choose the right hardware. If in the end you don't like running your own services you can always use something run by someone else so why not give it a try...

fnord123• 6 years ago

Why pay for Dropbox when you can use your very own box with far more storage for far less money?

Managing backups and data integrity is no joke. Almost everyone does a shit job and don't know it until the data is gone.

greenbush• 6 years ago

I've tried many of the options, and Croc [0] has always worked best for me. I tried Firefox Send, but the downsides were that the entire file had to finish uploading first and a lack of auto-resume. [0] https://github.com/schollz/croc

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

There's https://file.re/ that's worked okay for me.

Tanath• 6 years ago

Seems unlikely. The layoffs happened before they got a new deal: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-f...

Now they can bring people back.

fooker• 6 years ago

Now they can bring people back.

Or they can increase executive compensation.

How far in advance do you think these deals are decided before public announcement?

infinityplus1• 6 years ago

Anyone who left isn't coming back. They would now go for better opportunities.

macspoofing6• 6 years ago

You think they didn't know this deal was going to be signed before they announced their layoffs?

contravariant• 6 years ago

Now I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to managing companies so I can't be sure if that is the right move or not. However surely any management that announces massive lay-offs to then turn around and hire those same people back a few weeks later would have to be deemed blatantly incompetent (if not malicious)?

jjcon• 6 years ago

I’m glad to see the healthy skepticism towards Mozilla lately, they have long been a sacred cow in tech.

Just because a company’s mission is positive or aligns with ones values does not mean the company itself is good or is actually carrying that mission out.

fxtentacle4• 6 years ago

Agree, but you seem to be turning downvoted-transparent.

I am also always surprised that Mozilla receives so much praise for its technology stack, when their core source code for Firefox and Thunderbird is such a buggy pain to work with.

I understand that they inherited a legacy codebase, but I'm not sure that playing catch-up with Google on (in my opinion) useless features like WebUSB was good technical management. In fact, I would argue that letting technical debt accumulate to the point where you need to rewrite large parts in a completely different language and deprecate technologies still in use (e.g. XUL) is more like an admission of failed technical leadership.

So I am honestly surprised that Mozilla is cutting projects and firing developers, yet nobody seems to take action to reduce the overhead of their apparently incapable management.

bestouff• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm unlucky, but any company I worked in has that legacy codebase which kind-of works, has bugs, and that nobody wants to refactor - and I don't blame them, refactoring code which had years of debugging is not always a good idea if you don't have unlimited money.

porjo• 6 years ago

Mozilla senior leadership have also been caught up in the politically correct mantra that pervades much of silicon valley, which imho is a huge distraction from making great products. Case in point: https://mobile.twitter.com/newstephen/status/106048929137627...

franga2000• 6 years ago

This has to take the cake for one of the stupidest "we won't use this word because it's offensive or whatever" arguments out there.

Just because people call things that aren't a meritocracy a meritocracy does not mean that's what it means. It's like saying we don't want to say "democracy" anymore because China (PRC) calls itself a democracy and they actually aren't. Or if we turn the whole thing around, saying that "feminism" is offensive because TERFs use the term too.

Like, are there actually people who actually think like that? How do they communicate??

craigsmansion2• 6 years ago

Partial transcript:

"We aspire to the idea that a human being can demonstrate competence and earn respect and leadership and authority based on what you do and how you do it."

Video was posted on Nov 8 2018. I think everyone can draw their own conclusions.

jacquesm• 6 years ago

Don't put a lawyer in charge of a tech company.

fxtentacle4• 6 years ago

"But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little bit more bearable."

I remember just yesterday there was a great article on HN that discussed bullshit jobs and counted corporate lawyers towards the "goons". The rationale was that if nobody has them, nobody else needs them.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/bullshit-jobs-australia-2...

HPsquared• 6 years ago

It's kind of like the military in that sense. Anything 'PvP' falls in that category.

AlphaSite• 6 years ago

Who exists to enforce the rules? Contracts? Etc. I feel like this sounds great on the surface, but is quite flawed.

craigsmansion2• 6 years ago

You can put them in charge of a country, as long as they are effective.

"Hate the game, not the player", might be appropriate here, but even in corporate games players can simply be so ineffective that they should be replaced by someone who can actually play the game.

joecool1029• 6 years ago

hmm, Firefox Voice was supposed to eventually use the speech-to-text engine that's now under threat but instead currently uses Google's engine? Can't imagine priorities like this came up in their recent negotiations.

est31• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24245683

zo1• 6 years ago

Am I the only one trying to figure out why Mozilla even has a "speech-to-text" team?

stevenjohns• 6 years ago

You've actually touched on something very important here: Mozilla seems to be getting its fingers into more than it can handle. It wants to do everything but ends up doing a lot of things fairly poorly.

I switched away from Firefox to Brave yesterday. Became tired of how Firefox threads would consume 99% of my CPU endlessly until they're manually killed. This happened about four or five times a day, I'd only notice when performance of everything else tanks. I wish Mozilla would direct more resources towards Firefox than Lockwise and all the other half-baked junk they're spending developer time on.

dboreham• 6 years ago

In my experience Chromium does this too (busy spinning threads).

johannes1234321• 6 years ago

They want to build technologies which bring access for everybody. There is a huge population of people who can't type easily and where speech is an important alternative. Having all input running through an ad company (Google) or requiring to buy premium products (Apple) isn't good for an inclusive society valuing privacy.

Quoting their mission statement: "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent." https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/

However Mozilla seems like it did too many wrong bets and didn't execute well (see also FirefoxOS)

suby4• 6 years ago

The world needs a state of the art and easy to integrate library for providing speech to text so that we don't have to rely on sending all of our voice data to the big tech giants. I imagine this was the motivation behind it.

That being said, I think the current open source options are actually okay and constantly getting better. They're certainly a lot better today than they were 3 years ago.

hutzlibu2• 6 years ago

The thing is, good speech to text AI needs good training data. And lots of it. With as little error as possible.

They were also doing this. And made an easy to use website, where you could contribute and people did. I cannot imagine it was soo expensive that they now have to throw it under the bus.

HackedBunny• 6 years ago

My quick test of DeepSpeech, as posted on Facebook back in April:

I just ran a speech-to-text converter on a very clear clip of former Doctor Who actor Tom Baker talking in an interview.

The DeepSpeech converter uses the very latest AI deep-learning advancements to 'listen' to the audio and output the spoken words as text.

After 3 long minutes of running it on a 30-second clip, it printed out its interpretation:

"hooloomooloo how booboorowie i have a honeymoon"

fxtentacle4• 6 years ago

When I tried it out with English and German phone recordings, it was working competitively. I would have ranked it better than Amazon but worse than Google.

Did you maybe not convert your WAV to the correct sampling rate?

donw• 6 years ago

I didn’t know Tom Baker was Welsh.

twoslide• 6 years ago

It's supposed to work on sentence long audio (4 - 5 seconds), they suggest chunking your audio first: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/longer-audio-files-with-deep...

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

Also there's essentially two parts to this, the neural net is used for speech-to-characters, and then a language model is used to convert the character stream to words.

I found that the language model they supplied was trained data that did not contain the words I needed, and got significantly improved results when making my own language model using the kenlm[1] tools.

[1] https://kheafield.com/code/kenlm/

bmn__• 6 years ago

Experiment is worthless for drawing conclusions if it's not reproducible by other people.

Besides the hypothesis that DS sucks, the software could also very well be just fine and you made methodological errors.

dgellow• 6 years ago

It's always sad to see people at the risk of losing their job or the project they are working on. That being said, this Speech to Text engine always seemed to be more a distraction than anything else. There is of course a lot of pessimism at the moment toward Mozilla, and I subscribe to it for the most part, but if the recent changes and upcoming changes result in more focused projects and efforts that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

macspoofing6• 6 years ago

I don't understand what Mozilla is. They re-upped the Google deal to the tune of $400-450million/year for the next 3 years, so their revenue is secure. That's great. I can also understand that it makes sense to cut some side-projects that are probably a distraction (and this one may very well fit that category). But if you cut funding to things like MDN, Servo/Rust and move away from Firefox as a core focus (the thing that just brought you another $1.2 billion) .. what the heck is Mozilla now?

BiteCode_dev2• 6 years ago

Wait, move away from firefox as a core focus ?

macspoofing6• 6 years ago

Yeah. From https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...

They list their 5 areas to focus on .. and Firefox isn't mentioned by name anywhere. For example:

"New focus on product. Mozilla must be a world-class, modern, multi-product internet organization. That means diverse, representative, focused on people outside of our walls, solving problems, building new products, engaging with users and doing the magic of mixing tech with our values" (emphasis mine)

chrshawkes• 6 years ago

Firefox is getting its ass beat in the market right now. It's essentially a dying product.

jansan3• 6 years ago

I personally have the feeling that their main focus is on promoting wokeness/social justice in the software industry. They probably claim that their core competency is still browser technology, but I am not so sure when looking at our code and seeing comments like this:

  // Change these to proper private fields once Firefox supports them

CodeGlitch• 6 years ago

The phrase "get woke go broke" comes to mind unfortunatly.

I'm a heavy Firefox user, and have given money to Mozilla in the past, but their leadership has dropped the ball and I'm sorry to say I'm reluctant to give them any more $.

My hope is that they focus efforts on Firefox as an open-web, security and privacy-promoting system (which it does a lot of already). I do think things like Rust have been a distraction, the world doesn't need yet another programming language (compared to Modern C++, Rust doesn't seem worth the effort?).

untog2• 6 years ago

Plucking a single comment entirely out of context and presenting it as damning evidence against an entire company's competency feels kind of over the top.

callamdelaney• 6 years ago

This (text to speech) breaks pulse audio on my machine every time I enable reader view. Even if I'm not using text to speech or listening to anything else, I'll get a whiny noise until I restart pulse.

throwme45353464• 6 years ago

The browser does have this effect on Linux systems with pulseaudio. You will hear lots of static in your speakers, and after that the audio will be distorted until you restart pulseaudio.

What I cannot confirm is the relation of this to the speech-to-text engine. Reader mode most likely utilizes text to speech.

nshm2• 6 years ago

Not a big problem given so many alternatives around like

E.g. some very active projects are:

* Kaldi (https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi/) obviously, probably the most famous one, and most mature one. For standard hybrid NN-HMM models and also all their more recent lattice-free MMI (LF-MMI) models / training procedure. This is also heavily used in industry (not just research).

* ESPnet (https://github.com/espnet/espnet), for all kind of end-to-end models, like CTC, attention-based encoder-decoder (including Transformer), and transducer models.

* Espresso (https://github.com/freewym/espresso).

* Google Lingvo (https://github.com/tensorflow/lingvo). This is the open source release of Googles internal ASR system, and used by Google in production (their internal version of it, which is not too much different).

* NVIDIA OpenSeq2Seq (https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq).

* Facebook Fairseq (https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq). Attention-based encoder-decoder models mostly.

* Facebook wav2letter (https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter). ASG model/training.

* Vosk (https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api). Offline lightweight speech recognition API with support for 10 languages.

And there are much more.

Mozilla's Speech-to-Text Engine Is at Risk Following Layoffs

Related Stories