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This German nonprofit is building an open voice assistant that anyone can use
LAION, the German nonprofit behind a number of popular AI data sets, wants to develop an open voice assistant called BUD-E.
Wieland Brendel, a fellow at the Ellis Institute and a contributor to BUD-E, believes there isn’t an open assistant with an architecture extensible enough to take full advantage of emerging GenAI technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs) along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “Building the text-to-speech and speech recognition solutions ourselves means we can customize them to a degree that isn’t possible with closed models exposed through APIs,” Jakub Piotr Cłapa, an AI researcher at Collabora and BUD-E team member, said in an email. To that end, LAION has some pretty out-there ideas for BUD-E, ranging from an animated avatar to personify the assistant to support for analyzing users’ faces through webcams to account for their emotional state.
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