WeeklyUpdates/EmergingTechnology

September 18th, 2017

• Big Welcome - This past Monday we had six new folks join our Mixed Reality team, coming to us after working together at Altspace VR. In pursuing ET’s mission of growing new areas for Mozilla we’d identified a key opportunity for virtual and augmented reality in building new services and products around identity, presence, avatar, and multi-user services. We aim to build open services that work across both the tens of millions of VR devices and hundreds of millions of handheld AR devices to be enabled in the coming weeks through Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore. Definitely watch this space...
• Update on our Voice Fill experiment via Test Pilot -- We’ve fielded 29,955 spoken queries and are working on an update that would add voice integration to even more frequently visited Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Duck-Duck-Go websites. We’re also starting to receive contributions to the underlying code from community members, which is great!
• We’re kicking off our Developer Roadshow in Asia this week and next, with stops in Singapore, Ho Chi MInh City, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Hong Kong. Check out the website for links and more details, especially if we’ll be somewhere near you.

September 11th, 2017

• Project Things mentioned in a publication - The MagPi publication (official Raspberry Pi magazine) has an article about our Things project (issue 61) in the September issue which talks about Mozilla’s efforts in the area of IoT and Web of Things in particular.
• More companies announce they are using Rust in production - Atlassian & Tumblr have indicated they are doing so and will add their names to the “Friends of Rust” page. In case you’re curious, adding those two brings the official total to ninety five -- so stay tuned for word that we’ve reached one hundred organizations with Rust in production.
• We’re number one! - Initial integration of language model into a TensorFlow connectionist temporal classification beam search yielded a 6.48% word error rate on the Librivox clean test data set for DeepSpeech. What the heck does that mean? It means we have the best open source speech recognition engine (as our closest alternative, Kaldi, has a 8.01% word error rate on that same test data set). Booyah!
• More languages for Deep Speech - Oh, and we’ve landed the code that provides multi-language support for Deep Speech so the Community is now actively working on adding French, German, Spanish, Macedonian, Urdu, Persian, and Kurdish.

August 28th, 2017

• RustConf 2017 happened this past week in Portland, Oregon and was a big success. The event was completely sold out, which translates into 275 attendees all involved in and excited about Rust -- and we had lots of positive reactions from them during the conference. We also had conversations with a number of important tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, and Baidu, all of whom are looking at Rust and some already using it . (We even heard that Amazon is hiring for Rust so they’re active too.). RustBridge, an all-day diversity-focused initiative, had their fifth meeting at RustConf, with 20 attendees from underrepresented groups learning to program in Rust. Here's a picture: https://twitter.com/ag_dubs/status/898687617427881985
• Lin Clark published another in her series of “Code Cartoons” blog posts, this time on Quantum CSS (which we also know as “Stylo”). In order to properly explain Stylo Lin demystified and illustrated quite a lot of what goes on inside a web engine, and, like her other “Code Cartoons” the post has been very well received -- reaching over 650 points on Hacker News and being picked up by a variety of tech press and social media. Check it out: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-engine-quantum-css-aka-stylo/
• A big change is in the works for MDN Web Docs, in the form of an interactive code editor that will be added directly in relevant pages so developers can easily see and experiment with JavaScript and Web APIs. Starting this week we’ll be carefully A/B testing the interactive editor with a few users on a few pages, but if you’re curious you can get a look starting tomorrow (Tuesday) when the test goes live using one of these two magical URLs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/box-shadow?v=b and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/push?v=b
• The second Alliance for Open Media (AOM) face-to-face meeting since the start of AV1 development happened last week. There were twenty-five tools presented over two days. Eleven were adopted or conditionally adopted, and three of those were ours. Google presented seventeen of the twenty-five tools, and had five adopted or conditionally adopted.

August 21st, 2017

• Over 300,000 recorded voice samples have been contributed so far to Common Voice, adding up to over 400 total hours of data. We’ve also had over half a million samples validationsl. (In case you didn’t know, you can contribute not only by leaving us samples of your own voice but by listening to other people’s samples and confirming they match the target phrase. Check it out at https://voice.mozilla.org!).
• To understand a bit more about voice assistants, to inform a project we’re calling Foxy, we gathered about a hundred Alexa logs from Reddit and social media by paying $5 each for them. We found that around 40% of all commands were about music - playing artists or genres, stopping or starting playback, that kind of thing. Another 15% were general search queries: who did the voices for Animanics, or what’s the weather in Seattle? And another 15% were Internet of Things related queries, particularly turning lights on and off, so that’s informing some of the work we’re doing in Web of Things.
• VoiceFill has been running within Test Pilot. We’ve had 11,722 users enable Voice Fill overall. Over 800 users have been active in just in the past seven days, engaging in almost 2000 sessions, and we’re continuing to explore and experiment.

August 14th, 2017

• Facebook is open-sourcing a large Rust codebase! (It’s a modern take on the ancient theme of mediating between humans and trees.) Facebook is releasing a high performance mercurial server written in Rust. It’s open source, GPLv2. The project is called Mononoke and you can take a look on GitHub at https://github.com/facebookexperimental/mononoke.
• Firefox 55 made history as the first desktop browser to ship with WebVR enabled by default! (It’s just as much fun but a whole lot easier to maintain than those flying cars we’ve all been waiting for.) If you have a Rift or Vive, head on over to vr.mozilla.org for immersive demos. And if you’d like to develop VR content, the entire WebVR API is documented on MDN.
• The View Source conference is coming to London in October! View Source is a fantastic single-track conference, bringing visionary speakers to designers and front-end developers, and registration is now open. View Source is on October 27th, right before MozFest on the 28th and 29th. Sign up if you can make it, and spread the word!

August 7th, 2017

• Publish your own 360 degree videos with a new WebVR template! It’s easy to build Virtual Reality scenes with A-Frame, but we’re making that even easier by adding a tool that can get your project started using pre-built templates. A great first example of that is a template for publishing your 360 degree videos in VR. If you’d like to give it a try or just see how it works check out Salva’s blog post (Beware, this new tool is still in pre-release. Here be dragons.)
• Search the web with your voice using Firefox today! The Voice Fill test pilot went live last week and has been receiving a lot of attention: CNBC and TechCrunch both covered the launch with CNBC calling it a “challenge to Google’s AI dominance”. We’re closely monitoring how that experiment goes and working on a follow up release to make it even better and more responsive.
• Automate the web of things in your home! We landed an initial proof of concept prototype of a rules engine for the Things Gateway which lets you set “if this then that” style rules for the web of things in your home. Look out for an upcoming article about Mozilla’s Project Things in the official Raspberry Pi magazine, MagPi. A big shout out to community contributor Ian Gilham for contributing a new device adapter for the Things Gateway! Find out how you can contribute on our web site.

July 31st, 2017

• We need your voice! Literally! We recently unveiled Common Voice, a new project we’ve jointly created with the folks in Open Innovation. Common Voice seeks to create an open collection of labelled voice data anyone can use to build highly-accurate voice recognition software. We’ve asked people to help us out by capturing their voice and are receiving 15-20 thousand recordings a day. And we’re getting lots of good press coverage too. If you’ve participated already, “Thank you!”, and if not but would like to please head on over to the web site. We’re currently only set up to record English language samples but other languages are coming soon.
• WebVR in Firefox keeps getting better! Thanks to some requests from our friends at Sketchfab, we’ve made some substantial performance improvements. Sketchfab released the world’s first WebVR animated short film, including with full sound support. It’s an excellent example of the ongoing feedback loop between folks with the urge to create and our efforts to make the web better at supporting that creativity! Read more and watch (hear!) the video
• Big thanks to Dietrich Ayala for the blog post chronicling the amazing performance improvements in Firefox’s tab handling. We loved the social media and press pick-up around your 1691 open tabs, thanks to Quantum Flow. (I now have a new life goal...so thanks also for that). Check out headlines like “Firefox’s blazing speed with huge numbers of tabs leaves Chrome in the dust” to get the feeling of winning.
• The “Voice Fill” experiment we highlighted last week is slated to go live tomorrow, August 1. It was delayed along with all the pending Test Pilot projects, but we’re very happy it’s going forward now.

July 24th, 2017

• AV1 codec now enabled in Firefox Nightly. Check it out by watching a bit of the short film ‘Tears of Steel’ at http://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/. Keep in mind when you do that the whole idea here is to provide (and improve!) high quality audio and video on the web and make it all completely open and royalty free.
• Stylo has landed in Firefox Nightly on all platforms, so there’s more of Servo (and Project Quantum) for you to explore. It’s off by default but you can turn it on via a pref. Details on how to do that and general Stylo status info is available in a public Etherpad here.
• Keep an eye on Test Pilot this week for news as we’re launching an experiment called “Voice Fill” which will let you interact with the Web by talking to Firefox. Up first will be voice input to search engines so you can initiate web searches through speech.
• We’ve unveiled “Project Things” our Web of Things initiative, and our first project, an open WoT gateway, is available on github for download and use on a Raspberry Pi' Give it a try! Turn your lights on and off at home with it. (We do.)
• We trust you’re keeping an eye on what we’re up to with Developers by following our Hacks blog, but in case you aren’t Lin Clark published another great “Code Cartoon”, this time explaining how you can add WebAssembly to JavaScript on your web page and what’s going on under the covers when you do that. And we have posts from Andre Vrignaud and Jukka Jylänki about the latest and greatest for gaming on the Web.