My personal little conspiracy theory is that Google pays Mozilla as an antitrust shield.
A lot of us pretty much assume that much, but I think it goes much deeper.
I think Google pays and maintains a working relationship with the CEO of Mozilla (current and former) to purposely keep the organization rudderless, uncompetitive, and shrinking.
Mozilla spends its money building a 3D VR metaverse here, a bunch of AI models it later scraps over there, a web3 / distributed social program, etc. It scraps Rust, doesn't invest into Firefox. Just silly toys and experiments.
That nice CEO salary is hush money.
Just a fun little pet theory, totally not based on evidence.
Firefox is already an excellent and fast browser and people just don't use it. I think it's a marketing problem. Google, Microsoft, Brave, etc all put a lot of money and resources into promoting their browsers, pushing them at an OS level (with legal care), using ads etc. For Firefox to compete they'd need to spend a lot more of their money marketing and end up building far fewer fun toys and experiments, and they could still never achieve the same level as MS or Google.
I was part of the first generation Mozilla FireFox fan. Yep, I had the "Get FireFox" T-Shirt and everything. I came over from Netscape Navigator. After all these years honestly, good riddance. The glitches, the bugs, the crashes, the instability, and it took years or was it decades for them to make it so that extentions don't break on every update. Too little too late. There's no reason for me to go back. We already have the bad memories, and firefox comes with a lot of bad emotions for it to feel new and fresh again. Imagine Mozilla saying "Okay guys we redid FireFox again this time, do you want to try it?" NO.
> “Towards the end of 2004 I sent a note to somebody I knew here and saying that I was interested in anything that they might have and it turned out that Google was interested in Firefox. They liked the product and they thought it would be good to support its development, so eventually they hired myself and several other people from the Mozilla community to continue development on it.”
Presumably then Google developed a competing browser so they could collect more data and not come into constant conflict with Mozilla’s insistence on client-side-only data processing — but, as the interview above notes, the initial engagement appears to be because a coder suggested Google pay for Firefox development.
Has a nice sound to it but Hanlon's razor says: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. I'd be impressed if this was the case but I expect neither side is sufficiently competent or malicious to explain it.
I don't know if there's a direct quid pro quo relationship between the CEO of Mozilla and Google but I feel quite confident that Google absolutely influences the organization in ways beyond just the cash injection to make it rudderless, uncompetitive and shrinking as you say.
It could be as simple as ex-Google employees at lower levels than CEO who are paid by Google take positions at Mozilla, or more subtle things like guiding the direction of the organization through standards boards.
It would be really fascinating to look at the org charts of Mozilla past and present and try and build the network between people who worked at Google or Google related organizations before, during, and after their time at Mozilla.
Because you're absolutely right that the organization is so absolutely dysfunctional that it can't just be incompetence, it has to be absolute malice.
In my side by side testing of Whisper and Parakeet in transcribing Euro-English meeting recordings, Whisper produced the better result, but Parakeet was faster.
I'm sticking with Whisper as it is fast enough for my use case.
Look up for faster whisper or distilled whisper models, smaller models run quite nicely but perform poorly outside of English, if you are interested in a different language it's better to finetune it (HuggingFace has a huge amount of finetuned Whisper models).
Best CPU TTS that can run on something like a raspberry pi is Piper. It can do real time synthesis on a raspberry pi and on a real computer it runs several times faster with negligible performance cost. I use it for 'reading' ebooks when my eyes get tired. The quality is roughly on par with where Mac OS's TTS was ~10 years ago (the last time I used it.) You can tell it's TTS, but it's good enough that you can become accustomed to it fairly easily.
What voices do you recommend? The ones I had checked out (about a year ago) - the voices were mostly european-sounding, and flat, and not so natural-sounding. Is Piper the best open-source text-to-speech engine out there?
If this is for personal use the best local TTS is to grab a Mac, set the system voice to one of the current Siri voice models, and then use the 'say' command in the terminal. Yes, really. The nonbinary voice #5 in particular does really well at technical terminology.
It was discontinued 5 years ago - I’m not sure why it took so long to archive the repo.
https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/future-of-deepspeech-stt-aft...
Perhaps OP URL can be changed to https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mozilla-DeepSpeech-Discontinue...
I'd change it, except this submission is past the edit window. Perhaps dang or tomhow will see this and change it for me :)
Then comments should be moved hither: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44380572
If you email that to the mods, they’ll do so :)
You should email them about that!
[flagged]
What is wrong with this specific article? And what is wrong with Phoronix in general? Could you give us examples? Is your username satire?
My personal little conspiracy theory is that Google pays Mozilla as an antitrust shield.
A lot of us pretty much assume that much, but I think it goes much deeper.
I think Google pays and maintains a working relationship with the CEO of Mozilla (current and former) to purposely keep the organization rudderless, uncompetitive, and shrinking.
Mozilla spends its money building a 3D VR metaverse here, a bunch of AI models it later scraps over there, a web3 / distributed social program, etc. It scraps Rust, doesn't invest into Firefox. Just silly toys and experiments.
That nice CEO salary is hush money.
Just a fun little pet theory, totally not based on evidence.
Firefox is already an excellent and fast browser and people just don't use it. I think it's a marketing problem. Google, Microsoft, Brave, etc all put a lot of money and resources into promoting their browsers, pushing them at an OS level (with legal care), using ads etc. For Firefox to compete they'd need to spend a lot more of their money marketing and end up building far fewer fun toys and experiments, and they could still never achieve the same level as MS or Google.
I think I'd rather they keep innovating
I was part of the first generation Mozilla FireFox fan. Yep, I had the "Get FireFox" T-Shirt and everything. I came over from Netscape Navigator. After all these years honestly, good riddance. The glitches, the bugs, the crashes, the instability, and it took years or was it decades for them to make it so that extentions don't break on every update. Too little too late. There's no reason for me to go back. We already have the bad memories, and firefox comes with a lot of bad emotions for it to feel new and fresh again. Imagine Mozilla saying "Okay guys we redid FireFox again this time, do you want to try it?" NO.
> “Towards the end of 2004 I sent a note to somebody I knew here and saying that I was interested in anything that they might have and it turned out that Google was interested in Firefox. They liked the product and they thought it would be good to support its development, so eventually they hired myself and several other people from the Mozilla community to continue development on it.”
https://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php%3Fid=977.html
Presumably then Google developed a competing browser so they could collect more data and not come into constant conflict with Mozilla’s insistence on client-side-only data processing — but, as the interview above notes, the initial engagement appears to be because a coder suggested Google pay for Firefox development.
Has a nice sound to it but Hanlon's razor says: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. I'd be impressed if this was the case but I expect neither side is sufficiently competent or malicious to explain it.
Not heard of Hanlon's razor but I'll be quoting that
I don't know if there's a direct quid pro quo relationship between the CEO of Mozilla and Google but I feel quite confident that Google absolutely influences the organization in ways beyond just the cash injection to make it rudderless, uncompetitive and shrinking as you say.
It could be as simple as ex-Google employees at lower levels than CEO who are paid by Google take positions at Mozilla, or more subtle things like guiding the direction of the organization through standards boards.
It would be really fascinating to look at the org charts of Mozilla past and present and try and build the network between people who worked at Google or Google related organizations before, during, and after their time at Mozilla.
Because you're absolutely right that the organization is so absolutely dysfunctional that it can't just be incompetence, it has to be absolute malice.
Yes simple things such as becoming employed at Mozilla to perform corporate espionage for Google.
Corporate espionage targeting an open-source project?
White collar crime is very much a real thing and some of the most successful organizations got that way because they broke the law.
We don't live in a meritocracy and nice guys finish last.
That's just how things are.
Imagine an alternate timeline where Mozilla had named this project “FreeSpeech” instead as a free and open TTS solution.
I've been using Nvidia's parakeet model, it's been better than Whisper v3 large and smaller. Only supports English.
https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2
In my side by side testing of Whisper and Parakeet in transcribing Euro-English meeting recordings, Whisper produced the better result, but Parakeet was faster.
I'm sticking with Whisper as it is fast enough for my use case.
Does it need a newer GPU? Or can it run on just CPU?
Would it run on a raspberry pi?
Look up for faster whisper or distilled whisper models, smaller models run quite nicely but perform poorly outside of English, if you are interested in a different language it's better to finetune it (HuggingFace has a huge amount of finetuned Whisper models).
If you want real-time, it requires a GPU, but can be underpowered. CPU is a little slower but works fine.
Best CPU TTS that can run on something like a raspberry pi is Piper. It can do real time synthesis on a raspberry pi and on a real computer it runs several times faster with negligible performance cost. I use it for 'reading' ebooks when my eyes get tired. The quality is roughly on par with where Mac OS's TTS was ~10 years ago (the last time I used it.) You can tell it's TTS, but it's good enough that you can become accustomed to it fairly easily.
https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
What voices do you recommend? The ones I had checked out (about a year ago) - the voices were mostly european-sounding, and flat, and not so natural-sounding. Is Piper the best open-source text-to-speech engine out there?
You can also try Kokoro and Sherpa.
If this is for personal use the best local TTS is to grab a Mac, set the system voice to one of the current Siri voice models, and then use the 'say' command in the terminal. Yes, really. The nonbinary voice #5 in particular does really well at technical terminology.
They are talking about STT, not TTS, but as a TTS piper is very good and works nicely on a raspberry pi, I agree.
are there any linux/mac apps that allow people to use parakeet for daily dictation like SuperWhisper?
Sort of, check out https://github.com/senstella/parakeet-mlx.
It seems that the team that used to work on DeepSpeech then worked on coqui-ai STT https://github.com/coqui-ai/STT and now recommends using OpenAI Whisper (https://github.com/openai/whisper)
I still prefer festival, it's fast, it's in all the package repos, and I don't like automations having realistic voices.
They're opposites: DeepSpeech is speech to text, where Festival is TTS