Best Open Source Voice Assistants

A lot of us must have heard of voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana (and probably heard from them too).

These voice assistants are essentially based on voice recognition (of course), NLP, and synthesis of speech.

The global voice assistant market is forecasted to show a growth of 30% from 2018 @ $1.2 billion to $5.4 billion in 2024.

As per a recent consumer survey, it has been observed that 87.7 million U.S. adults were using smart speakers as of January 2020.

As of the 3^rd quarter of 2019, Amazon was leading the smart speaker market with 10.4 million units over Alibaba (3.9 mil), Baidu (3.7 mil), Google (3.5 mil), and others.

With such a surge in this market, a large number of businesses are raring to make it a part of their operations.

Since it is still not a fully realized technology, it makes more sense for businesses to opt for a voice assistant solution that could be easily customized or played around with.

So then, an open-source voice assistant is a perfect fit. Let’s try to dig deep into some of the best open-source voice assistants available as of today.

Here are the 7 Best Open Source Voice Assistants

Mycroft is probably the most popular among all the open-source voice assistant options and is the first one at it as well. Mycroft started its product campaign with Mark 1 back in 2015 and has come a long way since then.

Here is the know-how on getting started with Mark 1. Mark can work on all the rudimentary operations like answering factual queries, playing music for you, or providing you with the easy control of Wi-Fi connected appliances.

Mycroft has even created Mark 2 which is considered to be a next-generation smart speaker.

Michael Lewis has recently joined the firm as the new CEO. One can deduce through his interview that privacy and openness are of utmost importance to Mycroft in running their operations.

Pricing: Mark 1 would cost $149.99 and for Mark 2 as of now they have been collecting a small deposit of $1 for reservation. You’d need to wait sometime for the mass release.

Open Assistant is a prototype of an open-source voice assistant. What makes Open Assistant an all the more attractive voice assistant option is the fact that it ensures your voice commands are restricted to the device only.

Open Assistant comprises three primary components as; boot mind, root mind, and user minds.

Boot mind works as a sort of power button. This component is meant to initialize the system when the trigger word is spoken and thereafter the root mind is activated.

The root mind is the central component of this unit. This component helps the device respond to a basic set of voice instructions.

Then finally comes, user minds which is the most advanced component among the three with the ability to learn and behave in a specific way.

Pricing: It is free software.

Also Read: Here are the Best Healthcare Chatbots & Their Benefits

Shubhro Saha and Charlie Marsh were the two Princeton University students who developed this voice computing assistant.

Jasper works on some very basic hardware which includes a basic microphone, network adapter, and Raspberry Pi.

In terms of its capabilities, it performs a basic set of operations like playing music from Spotify, answering rudimentary questions like weather updates, or tracking social media updates.

Pricing: This again is free software that allows you to design functionalities as per your choice.

LinTO is another one of the open-source voice assistant solutions. This project is funded by the French government’s PIA (Future Investment Program).

What works greatly in favor of LinTO is that it can work as SaaS and deploy on your premises.

Some of the key features of this platform as are follows-

1. Updating the database with business-specific vocabulary.
2. It comes with state-of-the-art technology which minimizes the errors in wording.
3. Good at understanding intent from text.

Pricing: This open-source system is available under the GNU Affero License with no surplus charges and no freemium model.

This open-source voice assistant was created and is maintained by Michael Hansen.

Rhasspy is meant to run on the different type of hardware such as –

1. Raspberry Pi 2-3
2. Desktop/Laptop/Server
3. Raspberry Pi Zero

Rhasspy’s key features include wake word detection, speech transcription, intent recognition, and training.

Pricing: This open-source voice assistant is available under the MIT license.

Aimybox is an open-source voice assistant SDK that allows you to create your own assistant. This open-source SDK can be used both for Android and iOS.

Aimybox itself proclaims its extendable architecture as its most important feature which sets its completely free for any speech to text and text to speech transition.

Aimybox also proclaims itself to have the capabilities which can overcome the usual restrictions which are observed with other voice assistants.

Pricing: This voice assistant is available under Apache 2.0.

Leon, the voice assistant was developed by Louis Grenard. This assistant operates on servers. You can even talk with this voice assistant set up on your system and even exchange text messages.

Its 1.0.0-beta.2 release has been launched. It was aimed at allowing for more improvements to its NLU operations.

Pricing: This open-source voice assistant is available under the MIT license.

Conclusion

Many of these open source voice assistants have come into existence quite recently and will probably take some time to develop into a more sophisticated solution.

But still, you can opt for one of the above-mentioned voice assistants depending upon the extent of your requirement.

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