Intelligent personal assistant
by
Georgia Young
Contributions
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Published on
Jan 13, 2017 05:45 PM
Apple's Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Amazon Echo's Alexa, and other intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) are becoming more pervasive. Whatever convenience they provide comes with unacceptable tradeoffs: The breadth of access to users' data they take in order to operate is enormous, and the user does not have access to the code for either the client (because it's proprietary) or the server (because its code is not distributed).
A free software personal assistant is crucial to preserving users' control over their technology and data while still giving them the benefits such software has for many. This may be a particularly challenging project for free software developers, as most personal assistant software demands access to users' calendar, location data, and more, and they often incorporates image, speech, and natural language processing services -- but many free software users identified this project as one that is important to them.
Ways to help
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Mycroft is a free software home artificial intelligence product whose creators are also working on a free software speech to text project called OpenSTT, and who welcome contributions.
Other active projects include Pastec, a GPL image recognition platform, and OpenPR, a BSD licensed platform for "sharing algorithms of image processing, computer vision, natural language processing, pattern recognition, machine learning and the related fields."
This is just one item on the Free Software Foundation's High Priority Projects list.