As I suspected, high costs of hardware production to run on-device voice models, paired with difficulties to find hardware partners (which together resulted in high costs for the Mark II, as they had to rely on off-the-shelf components purchased at retail price) are among the reasons why #Mycroft is on its way to shut down.
But apparently there's a darker and more angering reason behind it.
The CEO mentions millions spent in a legal litigation with Voice Tech Corp., a "patent troll" that eventually dropped its charges, but only after costing millions to the startup.
I've done a bit of digging and I've found the text of the complaint: https://www.eff.org/document/voice-tech-corp-v-mycroft-ai-complaint. (Btw I've also found that this company has a single employee, acting as CEO, president and advisor, and not a single voice-based product ever released). And I'm quite horrified by what I've read.
Voice Tech Corp. accused Mycroft of allegedly breaking two of its patents - 9,794,348 and 10,491,679.
The title of these patents? "Using Voice Commands from a Mobile Device to Remotely Access and Control a Computer".
A lot of text just to say "this patent is about any solution that can parse human speech to text, find if it matches a command on a computer, and execute that command if required". The whole solution can be summarized in a ridiculously simple flowchart diagram worth of a barely sufficient assignment from a fresh college student.
But that's all you need (with a lot of technical jargon to gaslight a largely untechnical audience) to make money out of anyone who eventually develops something that looks like your naive flowchart.
These patent trolls didn't go after Google or Amazon for implementing exactly the same thing that they patented, well aware that their legal teams would have eaten them alive for breakfast. But they weren't scared to go after a startup with limited funding, hoping to squeeze some money out of them - and maybe put them out of business, for reasons that are still unclear.
Eventually it's smaller businesses and open-source projects that get harmed by this patent weaponization strategies - exactly the kind of actors that you need to keep a level playing field. Big Tech has large shoulders to defend themselves from these attacks, and they proactively purchase smaller companies just to be able to weaponize their patents. But smaller enterprises are much more vulnerable. Even if the lawsuit is eventually dropped, or if the court doesn't find sufficient ground to sue the defendant, the money, time and resources the small enterprise invests in the trial is often sufficient to put them out of business. And that's not to mention the case where the defendant is not even a small business, but an individual contributor of an open-source project.
Have I already said that #patents in technology are a tragic mistake that needs to burn in a ball of fire? We're way past the point where they could encourage innovation. They are a legal weapon used to achieve exactly the opposite nowadays. Up to grotesque and sad situations like Voice Tech vs. Mycroft.
It's almost like Voice Tech patented the sketch of a car drawn by a 2-year-old, and then sued somebody for actually building a real car. How is this shit supposed to actually foster innovation?
