What about using an Azure hosting VM? There are dozens of "plugins" for azure servers, including speech recognition.

There will be a reduces cost version. It will be about $10 a month and will use Google for voice and Wikipedia for information. It will be a while before this version is available.

Here is the deal and why it costs money... In order for dictated text to be used, you have to incorporate a natural language processor and speech classifier and a relationship extracter. There are some free ones available but it takes quite a bit of programming and a more extensive server to use them. The processing has to happen either on the client or on a server. We started down this path but decided that it would be better to make a great product instead of a weaker product. You could eliminate the $10 dollar charge by setting up your own API.AI service as a developer. This would allow you to then take our AI and use it in your developer environment at API.AI and we wouldn't get charged for your activity.

There is a limited number of requests per month and is public with no way to make the environment private.

Eventually there will be a free version by taking this path, but there is programming that we will have to do to utilize google and Wikipedia, which isn't our focus at this time. You would still need the server @87ish usd and the plug in for ARC, but this is a way to get similar features without a monthly charge. Now, once google starts charging for their API, we would then have to start charging for the use of that.

There is no telling what will be available next week much less by the time we modify EZ-AI to use these services. The technology is changing very quickly right now.

The machine learning parts of EZ-AI are built into the server and there is no charge for those. Those are custom programmed by us and we are not paying for a service for these items. If at some point in the future we go to a service, there could then be a cost associated for a more advanced machine learning mechanism, but our will remain free to use.

I hope this helps. We are simply passing the costs for these advanced services along. When we get corporate customers we will charge a different amount for them to use the product. Right now we are focusing on bringing what the robot community here and elsewhere want their robots to be able to do.

Yes, we use Azure servers for the authentication and account setup pieces. We have a couple of VM'so setup. We want the installation at the site to be self contained so to speak. There are services that are used, but this is from the local server to thesee services. There is user specific information on these servers and housing this information isn't what I want to be worried about. There could be photos taken for facial recognition and such which should be inside of that person's network and not on a cloud.

This AI is also used in Rafiki, so there are concerns there also due to it having things like paparazzi mode, and facial detection. The pods also use facial recognition...

Keeping everything in a nice neat package is a consideration. We personally found the services provided by nuance to be the best and return proper nouns correctly, along with support for a huge range of languages.