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Thalhammer / snowman

Snowboy reimplementation
https://thalhammer.github.io/snowman
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picovoice #18

Open csukuangfj opened 11 months ago

csukuangfj commented 11 months ago

Have you every tried to apply reverse engineering to picovoice?

Thalhammer commented 10 months ago

Have you every tried to apply reverse engineering to picovoice?

No I have not and likely never will¹. The intent of this repository was to provide a way to build the snowboy infrastructure from source and thus allow usage on newer platforms without doing crazy linker stunts or container stuff. I did this because the company behind it ceased to exist (at least in a form that supports snowboy).

Picovoice on the other hand is still a very much alive company, that is reliant on its tech to generate income and supports their codebase. They offer a free forever plan with reasonable limits for individuals (25h/month for request based apis, 3 concurrent users for continuous) and industry standard pricing² for companies. If you just slightly cross the free limit, theres not much stopping you from just registering multiple accounts and switching the access key on demand. If you like their product, support them.

The issue with this kind of projects is that reverse engineering technically violates the Terms of service and might even be legally problematic. If you feel like you want to take the risks of reversing something that has monetary value behind it, feel free to do so and I am happy to give you tips on what to look for and how to go forward. However I don't have the time to reverse something where reversing it does not really provide a benefit.

¹ I might look into reversing/removing the license check, if they ever go out of business or discontinue one of the products with no adequate replacement, but looking at their portfolio and customers I wouldn't expect that to happen any time soon. ² 6000$/yr is expensive for a individual, but a fairly reasonable price for a company. E.g. if you did 1000hrs/month on google's speech to text api you'd be looking at roughly 2x that price and picovoice includes way more than just speech to text, not to mention being private and thus by design compliant with pretty much every legislation out there.