STT internet connection details

[dcolliervb23]

What does the STT engine currently do with thr internet connection? Where does the traffic go and how can we know that there aren't the same privacy concerns as Amazon, etc?

[goldyfruit]

By default the STT is sending the audio recorded by your microphone when a wake word is detected to the STT public servers hosted by the OVOS community members (as @builderjer for Ziggy and myself for Smart'Gic).

Here is the code referencing the default public STT servers: https://github.com/OpenVoiceOS/ovos-stt-server-plugin/blob/dev/ovos_stt_plugin_server/__init__.py#L91-L96

You can find the list of the servers here: https://github.com/OpenVoiceOS/status

If you still have concerns, you can setup our own STT running locally which means that all the recording will not be sent over Internet.

[JarbasAl]

You can also run fully offline if your hardware can handle the job, for STT you usually want low latency and if you have a GPU (doesnt even need to be recent) there are great options to run offline

that said, we recommend self hosting whenever possible, the public servers are a volunteer service with no uptime guarantees, just there to make it easy to get started with OVOS