In focus
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- Indonesia was TikTok Shop’s second-largest market globally last year
Hello there,
I always find smart home devices gimmicky. The initial setup is cumbersome, and for those that support voice control, I can’t get them to work properly on the first try.
Asking my Google Nest Mini to play a specific Spotify playlist often only works on the second attempt, so I’ve mostly used it as a Bluetooth speaker.
The problem doesn’t seem to be the technology but the approach. Routing every command to the cloud adds latency, creates failure points when Wi-Fi hiccups, and raises privacy and cost questions.
It also makes voice interfaces feel unreliable for anyone with regional accents or code-switching – which is how people like myself speak at home.
Pete Warden started Moonshine AI to tackle these issues. His team builds small AI models that run directly on devices, processing speech without sending data to the internet.
That approach promises to cut delays and work during outages. It also lets manufacturers own the customer relationships instead of handing them to Big Tech.
In today’s Top Story, I look at how Moonshine does this and why Warden believes the tech could land in billions of devices by focusing on Asia, where most of the hardware is made and multilingual accuracy decides adoption.
The bet seems simple: cut the cloud, keep the accuracy, and win the manufacturers. If Moonshine could work this out, the next generation of smart devices may actually be smart without any cloud baggage.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
Top Story
Ex-Googlers take AI offline for billions of devices across Asia
Image credit: Timmy Loen
Former Google veteran Pete Warden thinks IoT devices are a pain to use, so he built a company to solve that problem. His solution? A tiny AI model that can be embedded into everyday devices to recognize and process human voices entirely offline.
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