Snips Lets You Add an Offline Embedded Voice Assistant

We’re all pretty familiar with voice assistants at this point. Services Siri, Alexa, and Google Now have been around for years, and most of us have asked them at least a couple of questions. If you’re a maker or hacker, you may have even built your own device that utilizes one of those services. And, if you have, you’ve probably noticed something pretty major: they all require internet access.

Siri, for example, handles all natural-language processing (NLP) in the cloud. That means that every word you say is recorded and uploaded to Apple’s servers for processing, which is a privacy concern for many. On a more practical level, it also means that Siri doesn’t function at all without a data connection.

But, a new startup called Snips wants to change that by putting an entire voice assistant, including all of the NLP tasks, in a maker-friendly offline package. Like Alexa, Snips can be configured with user-defined skills. You can create these yourself, or pay Snips to build them for you.

The idea here is that you can add a voice assistant to a device like a Raspberry Pi, and only need to set up skills for capabilities you’re actually planning on using. If, for example, you only want to use your Raspberry Pi as a music streaming device, then you could just setup the relevant commands (like “play” or “pause”). Snips is free for makers, so you can give it a try without any commitment. But, enterprise-level services are also being offered for those of you developing something a bit more ambitious.