An open-source voice control system that only processes data locally and is therefore not at risk of Internet giants breaking down and storing every conversation.
Jonas Brandstötter, Jonathan Hocheneder and Michael Poik pursued this goal when developing their diploma project “LocalSpeech” at the HTL Perg. The result was a P@BS award from the graduate association at the presentation of the Matura and project work of the HTL graduating classes last week excellent.
“Our project only uses open source libraries and guarantees 100% data protection for the voice recordings,” says Michael Poik, describing the finished project, which was created in cooperation with the Linz IT company “IT Pro”. With “LocalSpeech” there are several “slaves” – i.e. end devices – that can be set up in several rooms in a household or in individual offices in companies. These slaves pick up voice commands and forward them to a “master”, which processes them and sends the answers back to the end devices. “For example, we can process time recordings via voice input or query what the company canteen has on the menu today,” explains Jonathan Hocheneder. Since all devices only communicate with each other locally and do not have to access any external servers, no private data is passed on to third parties. Only the implementation of new commands takes place via a web interface.
The local language assistant was just one of six award-winning projects from the HTL graduating classes. The role-playing game “Pixode Adventure” by Florian Primetshofer, Samuel Pointner, Christoph Röhmbacher and Nico Stumptner won the prize in the “Technology” category, which is worth 400 euros. In the “Economy” category, the graduate association awarded Verena Ennikl, Tobias Hochedlinger and Jakob Zwölfer for their server-based construction site planning program developed with ÖBB.
In total, almost 30 diploma and project theses were created by this year’s two graduating classes. Usually in cooperation with well-known project partners such as ÖBB, Dynatrace, Rosenbauer or BMD. “Once again, our high school graduates have demonstrated great problem-solving skills and, despite all the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, have worked extremely hard,” says Director Christian Reisinger, praising the work of his project teams.
Source: Nachrichten
