Deepin's New AI Voice Assistant

After reading Jason Evangallho’s Forbes article I just wonder if Deepin’s EULA will allow other distro’s like Gnome or KDE to add this to their respective OS’s.

At the end of Deepin’s English EULA, it states “This EULA is published in Simplified Chinese and English. No matter which language version you read, the Simplified Chinese version shall prevail.” Also, there is no mention of ‘Free’ in their EULA, and it looks to like what is used from GNU’s EULA is one thing, but everything is proprietary or ‘non-free’.

Do any of us really know what the Simplified Chinese version is, and is it set up for small discrepancies or are there any big differences between the EULA’s? Is there a difference when you install the Deepin OS compared to something like Manjaro’s Deepin?

I’m not getting into whether or not Deepin tracks or not, because I’m sure the US and other governments do a little tracking of their own. I’m more interested in Deepin’s spirit of FOSS.

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Call me paranoid if you like, but I would consider this, possibly, as the beginning of the spying techniques used on our phones and TV remote controls, and Amazon / Google assistant appliances coming to linux.

Again, this is just my opinion, I would steer far and wide of this and will take a wait and see after those much more skilled at evaluating and testing this new capability.

The issue with facebook activating phone cameras and microphones without consent is still fresh in my mind. This was one of reasons I came to linux…to get away from this crap.

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I’d guess that this service would be proprietary, but that’s based on absolutely nothing. Servers, machine learning, data modelling, multiple language support, and so on, feels more expensive than beer, if you catch my meaning.

Though, count me in with @Mr_McBride I’d steer clear of a voice assistant full stop, not that they’re not super cool or possibly helpful. Data to train and improve algorithms has to come from somewhere, there’s no malice in it (I assume) but I’d be pleased as punch for that data not to be mine sent back to who knows where to be stored, logged for who knows how long and analyzed by a team for ends that are opaque to me.

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Unless I can call it Jarvis and make it respond in Paul Bettany’s dulcet cut-glass English RP, then no dice :joy:

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When @JasonEvangelho says “That Every Distribution Needs” a Voice Assistant, I disagree with that. I feel that “Needs” is too strong a word.

I, for one, would like to avoid a future where such assistants become so central to a distro that they become installed by default, and unremovable, which is the case with Windows 10, at present. Just because the popular, proprietary OS’ of the world do it this way, doesn’t mean the FOSS community should follow suit.

Let’s see how much the popularity of Deepin increases, owing to this addition. That would be an interesting indicator of how much people really want such a feature.

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Whenever I hear a sentence like ‘Every Distribution Needs’, I get goosebumps. No internet journalist can tell me what my Linux distro needs. I know what my system needs and I’ll install those stuff myself thank you very much.

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I make that statement because it will help desktop Linux gain more traction in the mainstream, but SPECIFICALLY because we need more accessibility options on Linux.

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I have no problem with Linux gaining more traction in the mainstream, but I’m kind of getting tired of the notion that every distribution should shoot for this goal.

Fair…but from an accessibility point of view, I think this is needed.

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While I understand the historical “don’t tell me what I want” pragmatism that is part of the reason I love Linux. I think Jason played the right card here. Imagine if on install every desktop operating system had an accessibility page that had a tick box for voice assistant. For that matter how much less offensive would Windows 10 had been if it had gone that route for 90% of it’s features.
I probably wouldn’t install it on most of my systems but I have to admit that watching a low sight friend get full benefit with reduced effort makes me see the benefit.

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The great opportunity for Linux here is to push an alternative from an accessibility standpoint that all mainstream distros can back vs. creating 80 different half baked versions. I think Jason is right, there is a need from accessibility standpoint. Personally, I can’t stand voice assistants outside the scope of an accessibility feature; I’ve used all of them and they all suffer from being clunky, make too many mistakes and don’t offer me much convenience at all. The privacy issue of course makes them entirely avoidable.

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