Hacker News: synesthesiam

New comment by synesthesiam in "Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model"

synesthesiam — Tue, 12 May 2026 23:05:07 +0000

On my list to check out tomorrow :D

New comment by synesthesiam in "ESpeak-ng: speech synthesizer with more than one hundred languages and accents"

synesthesiam — Fri, 03 May 2024 00:24:47 +0000

As the sibling comment mentions, the next version of Piper will no longer use espeak-ng to avoid potential GPL licensing issues.

New comment by synesthesiam in "Pine64 March update: making waves"

synesthesiam — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 14:06:50 +0000

Yes, it is possible by installing the Wyoming Satellite software on the Mark II. All the pieces are there, it's just missing some easy-to-install firmware. Source: I worked at Mycroft on the Mark II and am now the voice guy for Nabu Casa (Home Assistant).

New comment by synesthesiam in "Midlibrary: Library of 4000 Midjourney artistic styles"

synesthesiam — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 19:12:16 +0000

Look into training a Dreambooth model. Huggingface has a guide for this.

New comment by synesthesiam in "StyleTTS2 – open-source Eleven-Labs-quality Text To Speech"

synesthesiam — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 14:52:07 +0000

You may want to try Piper for this case (RPi 4): https://github.com/rhasspy/piper

New comment by synesthesiam in "Year of the Voice – Chapter 2: Let's talk"

synesthesiam — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 17:05:24 +0000

Thank you for the kind words, @follower!

I'm the author of Piper; it is a successor to Larynx (originally named Larynx 2). Piper uses the same underlying model as Mimic 3, which I developed before joining Mycroft. However, Piper uses a different library to get word pronunciations, so the voices aren't compatible between the two projects.

It's been an awesome year so far with Nabu Casa, and I'm very fortunate to be able to work on something I love. I hope to contribute to the open source voice space for many years to come :)

New comment by synesthesiam in "Year of the Voice – Chapter 2: Let's talk"

synesthesiam — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 16:59:40 +0000

Neon AI and OVOS are taking over development of Mycroft Core and the Mark II: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mycroftai/comments/1212h87/neon_ai_...

New comment by synesthesiam in "Year of the Voice – Chapter 2: Let's talk"

synesthesiam — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 02:16:01 +0000

Coauthor of the blog post here. You're right, I said it on the live stream we had today but forgot to mention it in the blog post: the i5 is from a Lenovo ThinkCentre M72e. They're available refurbished for less than the cost of a Pi 4 these days, so it seemed to be a good comparison!

New comment by synesthesiam in "Year of the Voice – Chapter 2: Let's talk"

synesthesiam — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 01:44:01 +0000

I used to work for Mycroft, so I'm hoping to eventually create an image that's compatible with Home Assistant pipelines.

For now, though, you may want to check out OVOS: https://openvoiceos.com/

New comment by synesthesiam in "Year of the Voice – Chapter 2: Let's talk"

synesthesiam — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 01:09:52 +0000

Home Assistant and Rhasspy 3 will be able to share voice services thanks to the shared Wyoming protocol. Rhasspy 3 will have more options, including lots of experimental services.

New comment by synesthesiam in "Year of the Voice – Chapter 2: Let's talk"

synesthesiam — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 01:05:23 +0000

Mark I or Mark II?

New comment by synesthesiam in "We fell out of love with voice assistants"

synesthesiam — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 15:23:06 +0000

I'm working right now on adding voice control to Home Assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2022/12/20/year-of-voice/

Our goal is local voice control of your devices in your native language (no Internet required). Hardware is still an open question, but I believe we will succeed due to our focus on a limited domain (IoT) and large open source community.

New comment by synesthesiam in "OpenAI quietly launched Whisper V2 in a GitHub commit"

synesthesiam — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:34:27 +0000

Have you tried whisper-cpp?

https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/tree/master/example...

New comment by synesthesiam in "Rhasspy – Offline private voice assistant for many human languages"

synesthesiam — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 15:33:23 +0000

This has always been a struggle. Rhasspy can gather lists of songs, artists, etc. but it will have to guess many of their pronunciations. And it seems artist/band names often purposely thwart conventional pronunciation rules :P

New comment by synesthesiam in "Rhasspy – Offline private voice assistant for many human languages"

synesthesiam — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 03:55:12 +0000

They share a lot of the same pieces, but voice2json is meant to work in Unix-style pipelines. Rhasspy has MQTT/HTTP/Websocket APIs instead.

New comment by synesthesiam in "Mycroft – open source voice assistant"

synesthesiam — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:19:03 +0000

Sorry about that. I'm going to be working more closely with native German speakers to get it right!

New comment by synesthesiam in "Rhasspy – Offline private voice assistant for many human languages"

synesthesiam — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 23:36:07 +0000

This was the reason I designed voice2json [1] :)

[1] https://voice2json.org/

New comment by synesthesiam in "Rhasspy – Offline private voice assistant for many human languages"

synesthesiam — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 23:35:10 +0000

You're welcome! What sort of hardware did you settle on for the satellites?

New comment by synesthesiam in "Rhasspy – Offline private voice assistant for many human languages"

synesthesiam — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 17:43:22 +0000

Rhasspy author here, thanks for posting! Just wanted to mention that I've joined Nabu Casa (creators of Home Assistant) this month, so Rhasspy will be receiving updates again and be a major part of Home Assistant's "Year of Voice" in 2023 :)

New comment by synesthesiam in "Ask HN: Is A Tour of C++ the best way to learn c++?"

synesthesiam — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 22:53:40 +0000

Is there a good guide for writing Rust-like C++, e.g. using stuff in the recent standards to avoid the many footguns?