Linux.conf.au 2019 – Thursday – Session 2

Go All-In! – Bdale Garbee

Bdale Garbee
  • How to get companies involved in FOSS
  • First contribution of source code was almost 40 years ago
  • Used Vax BSD at CMU – HAd the deal with an obscure priesthood
  • KA9Q TCP/IP stack for amateur radio in the 80s
  • Appearance of RMS in my world
    • GNU Manifesto
    • 4 Freedoms
    • GPL
  • Debian
  • Worked as LInux CTO from one of the largest IT companies in the world
  • Collaborative Development Model
    • Spread out besides just making FOSS
    • No one company in charge
    • Diverse range of contributors, massively different motivations
    • We get a software commons we all get to benifit from
  • Free Software means Freedom of Choice
    • Reduced barriers between users and producers of software
    • Any user can be a dev, or pay someone to dev
    • If upsteams goes bad, things can be forked
  • What it means to be successful when you are operating in an open and collaborative model?
    • The goal of a trad company is for investment to yeld technological control points
    • First mover advantage
    • Differentiated features, preferably patentable
    • Collaborative dev model allows us to recognise the benifit of collaroation on all the non-differentialting elements. Leavign more value to the users / customers
    • Thinks less about control points, more about points of affinity. What is it that would make a customer want to user you products or services?
  • Innovation these days largely takes place in the open space
  • Wrights/Goddard – They didn’t get told to to the next new thing, they just started it as a hobby
  • Free Software enables people who we don’t know exist to create innovation and invent things we can’t imagine
  • Long Tail of Contribution
    • Example: People who did one Linux Kernel contribution, often to fix on specific thing that was causing them problems.
    • No company on earth that can hire that resource
    • Needs to be easy for people to access the code and make contributions
  • Attributed of Successful Communities
    • Active contribution and collaboration
    • Diverse participation
    • Solid core of code
    • Recognizable mainline trunk
    • Unified, cohesive structure
    • Low barriers to entry
  • Choosing the right license
    • Businesses can only be successful with permissive licenses
    • The most successful projects seems to be communities built around open contribution
    • Share-alike licenses stop possible problem of Closed Corporate fork while the original project withers

Beach Wreck Ignition: Challenges in open source voice –
Kathy Reid

Kathy Reid
  • MycroftAI – One of the few open source voice stacks
  • Introduction to a Voice Stack
    • Wake Word – eg “Hey Alexie”
    • Utterance – Phrase of command
    • Speech2text processor
    • Looks for keywords etc
    • Runs a command
    • Dialog – acknowledger + response
  • Wake Word
    • PocketPhinx, Snowbox, Mycroft Ai Precise
    • Some use Phonemes (smallest units of sounce in a language)
    • Hard to tell differences between all words
    • Always listening, connected to internet
    • Some use Use Neural networks
    • Low accuracy can cause frustration
      • Bias towards male speaker (10:1 male:female in dataset). Also more with American than other accents
      • To unbias the sample had to tag the samples with ethnicity, gender etc. Which was a problem with ethics of taggign samples/speakers
  • Speech to Test
    • Kaldi – no network needed, compute heavy
    • Deep Speech – From mozilla
    • Challenges
      • Lots of accents out there. Hard
      • Only trained for most common accents
      • Also problem with regional slang
      • Need to train on individual speaker
      • But need lots of data to understand a speaker
  • Endangered Languages
    • No commercial imperative to cover them
    • Mycroft Translate using Pootle to translate command words to 40 languages
    • Issues for gendered languages, formality
  • Intent Parsers
    • Rasa, Mycroft Adapt, Mycroft Padatious
    • Intent Collisions – Use confidence scoring depending on how explicit the request is.
  • Text to Speech
    • Mary TTS, Espeak, Mycroft Mimic, Mycroft Mimic 2
    • Mimic recording studio, Need 40-60 hours audio
    • Challenges
      • Natural sounding voice – making the voice sounds not robotics
      • Pronunciation – often requires after creation

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