Snowboy shutdown

[jaumard]

From their repo:

Dear KITT.AI users,
We are writing this update to let you know that we plan to shut down all KITT.AI products (Snowboy, NLU and Chatflow) by Dec. 31st, 2020.
we launched our first product Snowboy in 2016, and then NLU and Chatflow later that year. Since then, we have served more than 85,000 developers, worldwide, accross all our products. It has been 4 extraordinary years in our life, and we appreciate the opportunity to be able to serve the community.
The field of artificial intelligence is moving rapidly. As much as we like our products, we still see that they are getting outdated and are becoming difficult to maintain. All official websites/APIs for our products will be taken down by Dec. 31st, 2020. Our github repositories will remain open, but only community support will be available from this point beyond.
Thank you all, and goodbye!
The KITT.AI Team
Mar. 18th, 2020

Maybe would be nice to have an alternative to it.

[evancohen]

I'm open to suggestions for other wakeword libraries :)

[jaumard]

I've found this one https://github.com/Picovoice/Porcupine and they have a benchmark that compare snowboy with them here https://github.com/Picovoice/wake-word-benchmark

Didn't test it but look promising :)

[eouia]

Porcupine has a critical issue. It allow to you create only one custom wakeword even with payment. And they haven't opened the price. Even with Enterprise license, your created custom only one wakeword should be revamped per each 30 days. I don't think this could be used for personal DIY purposes.

[jaumard]

Hum I didn't know this limitations :( shame as it looked pretty promising. Do you have other solutions @eouia ?

[eouia]

I haven't found any good alternative yet. Pocupine looks so really nice but they haven't support real community version.
Jarvis or PocketSphinx would be the last option to consider due to their limited power.

Precise of Mycroft AI (https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/precise) would be considerable, but I haven't tested it yet

Mozilla Deep Speech would also be another option. But it looks consuming too much computing power.

[ncpleslie]

What about maintainers such as https://github.com/bugsounet/snowboy ?

Edit: And it's gone :(

[jaumard]

As he said he will maintain je nodeJS part which is nice, but if you have no way to create new hotword it useless for new project, as they will probably shut down the website too. But nice findings ! It can be useful to a lot of people a maintain existing project!

[sdetweil]

@ncpleslie @jaumard that would have been a good choice, he added support additional local hotwords recently, but due to a disagreement with another github user has withrdawn all his github repos.

[sdetweil]

there are other instances of snowboy