Visiting New Zealand

I am a longtime Linux developer and will be staying with friends in
Rotarua from Feb 2 through April 21. I'd love to both attend and present
at a Linux User Group while I'm there.

Presentation idea description:

The voice interface represents another big shift in user interfaces, and
could be as big a shift as the shift from switches to terminals, the
switch from terminals to windowed GUIs, or the switch from full
computers to small touchscreen devices.

Unfortunately, right now most of these devices are little more than a
telephone for talking to a server in the cloud. That is a big problem
for privacy, and presents the user with a false choice between access
and privacy. Today's computers are capable of handling a verbal
interface without requiring a cloud service to handle all of your requests.

I am one of the developers on the Naomi Project, a free and open source
voice assistant (https://projectnaomi.com). It is a plugin based system
based on Jasper (http://jasperproject.github.io/), and depending on how
the user chooses to configure it, can run totally offline.

In this presentation, I'd like to introduce people to the Naomi Project,
talk about the benefits of a verbal interface, talk about the current
architectures of virtual assistants, and ways in which that architecture
can be altered to provide better privacy, and also do a comparison of
offline speech to text and text to speech solutions, including
Pocketsphinx, Mozilla Deepspeech, Kaldi, and Julius. Finally, I will
invite people to participate in building and improving Naomi. There is a
lot to do and much of it is both engaging and cutting-edge.

Please let me know if you are interested, or if you know of other active
groups I should contact.

Thanks,

Aaron

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