On: Amazon Echo Dot

[revelation]

The moment you clamored for MIT embedded Linux software and the "let's kill all the GPL it's bad for startups" meme came up.

So now this cool audio controlled personal assistant is just another gadget to buy more stuff from Amazon, instead of something you control.

[michaelt → revelation]

Is this voice recognition stuff based on MIT-licensed open source speech recognition? I have a project that would benefit from good quality speech recognition.

[revelation → michaelt]

Well, no, that's the other thing: "let's put everything in the cloud so nobody owns anything anymore!".

Voice recognition is done on some Amazon server. If it goes down or changes API in five years, it will render this thing a brick.