Thanks Canonical…I’ll just throw it in the pile with all the other “wonderful” things you’ve made. It can go on the shelf next to Mir.
maybe it will lead to better accessibility tooling. This is obviously rather silly as a default mode of operations, especially if you imagine people in a crowded office all yelling at their computers.Canonical can take its AI and walk into the sea
You don’t like accessibility?
Not for that price.
The “price” of a free offline speech to text AI model? Three of them, actually, to work with varying levels of compute resources available?
You anti-AI folks are friggin’ ridiculous.
Being real, this is why I fucking hate the bullshit, corporate greed hype of LLMs and generative software. All the “bubble” shit? It tars all versions of the technology with the same brush.
This? This is exactly what it should be used for. And, ffs, earlier speech to text was really the same fucking thing in essence. Software that took input in the form of voice, compared it to a set of data, and made a best guess at what you meant. Yeah, the details are different, but it’s the same concept.
This? This is fucking awesome. Locally run, and doing a job that’s vital in accessibility, with the side benefit of being useful to others. Assuming canonical is being honest anyway.
But this kind of thing should be the way things are done.
That’s why we should not call everything AI
But it is AI, so it should be called that. People should adjust their simplistic notions about the term instead
This would have been better received if they just didn’t use AI in the name. Sure, it’s just using an LLM under the hood, but it’s running purely locally. It also betters Linux since it helps address an accessibility issue.
The framework split things into two groups, implicit AI that quietly improves what you already use and explicit AI that are features you’d actually summon on purpose.
The very first paragraph already upsets me. Have in mind, I would criticize this on every other operating system too. I believe no one should use Ai tools that act autonomously in the background, to improve or change what you already use. It should always be a “summon on purpose”.
Bit of a click baity title lol. Of theres one good use of AI, its probably accessibility.
Yeah, “Ubuntu wants you to use their new feature” is… unsurprising. Explaining the benefits and purpose of that feature? Now you’re talking.
Out of curiosity would it be accurate to call this sort of technology generative ai, or just machine learning? Or it depends on the implementation?
I feel like most of the anger around ai is because gen ai has a bunch of harmful baggage, and I’m curious if this is an example of gen ai having a productive use case, or an example of ai being more useful outside of gen ai specifically
This is genai
Based on their explanation, this is still using genAI. They talk about pre-processing the data and chunking it before it’s sent to the inference model.
That’s just how LLMs read data, it could just be for a text search. The problem is where that data came from, if they’re outputting text from it, if they’re getting people to trust that output, and if they’re getting kickbacks from Nvidia for it.
Offline-only speech-to-text, integrated with the desktop for push-to-talk voice typing? That’s the kind of AI that I’d like to see. Actually add features that can help people without harming their rights. I’m still moving new machines to Debian but this is nice.
Also how is speech to text AI? It has existed for decades, obviously a lot better now but I don’t think I’d consider it “AI”
I have been using a speech-to-text AI system the last day, and I’m using a whisper large 3 turbo and a rewording model that fixes the sentence but doesn’t rewrite it, and it’s almost perfect. I’m using European-hosted AI through cortecs.ai, and it’s really cheap.
There’s been ML and non-ML ways of doing STT over the years. as far as I recall. The current best implementations are ML-based. In coloquial terms ML algorithms are AI. We used to call them AI in the 2010s, before AI was (un)cool.
My grandma used to hate tech until she learned to use the voice assistance on her mobile phone. It unlocked the phone for her because she doesnt have the dexterity to type. I hope one day this tool could get to that same point.
Implicit optional features to use local LLMs for STT is something that I think most reasonable people could get behind. Too many accessibility tools for the disabled sit behind paywalls and subscription models.
More AI stuff as usual, waiting to see demonstration how this will work
Erm, no.
Come on.
Offline-only is privacy-respecting. Accessibility is a noble goal.
All in all, if there’s an AI usecase that’s as morally acceptable as it gets, it’s this one.
I get that it’s Ubuntu of all people, but even Big Tech produces some ideas every now and then that FOSS lovers can get behind and democratize!
