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 [1]a promising speech-to-text engine with [2]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 [3]0.9.3 all the way back in December 2020 and there hadn't been any Git activity since 2021.

Even back in 2020 [4]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 [5]this Git commit pushed last week to DeepSpeech that has now formally discontinued the open-source project.

Another Mozilla open-source project officially abandoned.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/DeepSpeech-0.6-Released

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/DeepSpeech-0.9-Released

[3] https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/releases/tag/v0.9.3

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/DeepSpeech-At-Risk

[5] https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/commit/6913ae817bc09159c64def7f130708682c197ba3