One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn’t related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project.
Mozilla DeepSpeech was a promising speech-to-text engine with great performance for real-time communication even when running on Raspberry Pi SBCs and other low-power systems.
Mozilla discontinuing DeepSpeech sadly doesn’t come to much surprise. The last tagged release was 0.9.3 all the way back in December 2020 and there hadn’t been any Git activity since 2021.
Even back in 2020 DeepSpeech was considered at risk of ceasing development following Mozilla layoffs and depending upon whether DeepSpeech would find a new home.
It’s been silent for years while today I was alerted to this Git commit pushed last week to DeepSpeech that has now formally discontinued the open-source project.
Another Mozilla open-source project officially abandoned.
