Snips

» see snips.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Rand Hindi founded Snips in Paris in 2013 with Maël Primet and Michaël Fester, and by 2017 it had turned into the one voice assistant whose pitch was the absence of a server. You opened a web console and typed in example sentences for whatever you wanted the thing to understand. The browser trained an assistant out of them and you downloaded it onto your own hardware. From that point on the speech recognition and the intent parsing happened on a Raspberry Pi in your house, and nothing you said went anywhere.

The money arrived on the strength of that. Something like twenty two million euros went in, mostly from French and European investors, and in May 2018 the company announced it would fund a smart speaker with a token sale instead of another round. The AIR token was cancelled in December of that year with the buyers refunded, and Snips published its own account of why under the title "5 Lessons from a Failed Token Sale", which is a more honest document than most startups manage about anything. The hardware it was meant to pay for, a speaker called AIR Base and a battery-powered microphone called AIR Satellite, was due in late 2019 and never shipped.

What shipped instead was an acquisition. Sonos closed the purchase on 14 November 2019 and announced it on the twentieth, for $37.5 million. Twelve days later, at four in the afternoon on 2 December, a Snips staff account posted a thread on the company forum titled "Important message regarding the Snips Console". After three years of working with this incredible community, it said, the console would be closing on 31 January 2020, and would stay open until then so that people could complete and download all their projects. Sixty days.

My own work puts the model on the aircraft instead of behind an API, because a drone over a field in central Anatolia cannot stop and ask a datacenter what it is looking at. The Snips argument was that same argument pointed at a microphone instead of a camera, which is the case I make in meetings for a living. The difference is where the training sits. An airframe keeps the model it was given, and a Snips assistant kept its model too, but every change to that model went through a website in Paris.

~ the case file ~

~ what ran on the device ~

The runtime listened for a wake word, which was "Hey Snips", and then did the recognition and the language parsing locally, compiled down small enough to sit on a Pi 3. The language layer, snips-nlu, was open source on GitHub in Python and Rust, and it is still sitting there today with its documentation badges intact. Nothing about any of it required a connection.

The console was the exception, and it was the exception that mattered. Training an assistant meant uploading your example sentences and your slot definitions to snips.ai, where the models were built for you. You could run offline forever once you had the artifact in hand. Changing one phrase meant logging back into a website owned by a company that was for sale.

~ two months to get your work out ~

The replies under that December announcement are a readable record of what a maker community sounds like when a platform closes. One poster pointed out that months of silence had been followed by two months to finish projects that had taken a year. Another asked whether Sonos planned to release any part of the console so that development could continue in the open. Within twenty minutes of the post going up somebody had started a petition on GoPetition called "Let Snips makers live", addressed to the Sonos chief executive Patrick Spence by name.

The console closed on schedule. By 31 January 2020 people were reporting that it was no longer possible to modify anything, and within days the forum those complaints were written on had been taken down too. The replacement nobody had planned for turned out to be Rhasspy, the fully offline assistant that absorbed a good share of the refugees, and Mycroft, which had its own ending coming.

~ what is still at the address ~

snips.ai answers today. It serves one screen in the company's own typeface, under the black lowercase wordmark: Snips Acquired by Sonos, over a sentence about joining the Sonos family to bring embedded voice recognition to brilliant sound and beyond. Below that sits one more line promising that the team would keep operating out of Paris as the Sonos Voice Experience group. That page has been the entire site since early 2020.

The Paris team delivered. Sonos Voice Control launched in the United States on 1 June 2022, voiced by Giancarlo Esposito, processing every command on the speaker with no audio sent anywhere. It is the private-by-design assistant Snips promised, and it answers questions about music on speakers that cost several hundred dollars.

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