Picovoice Documentation Issue (/docs/quick-start/console-signup/)

[FGMarshall]

https://picovoice.ai/docs/quick-start/console-signup/

Make it clear that Rhino intents are only valid for 1 month for personal use (i.e. useless) - not just at the final download stage after the visitor has spent many hours learning the system. A proportion of free users will become commercial one day - or at least spread enthusiasm across the forums. This business model will be very slow to gain momentum.

[dbartle]

Apologies for the frustration; our intention is to provide that information upfront. We previously had the 30-day limit more clearly signposted, but that was lost in translation when the website was updated recently. We've added notices in the docs to make that clear ahead of time. Thank you for the feedback.

[FGMarshall]

On 24 Dec 2020, at 22:34, David Bartle ***@***.***> wrote: Apologies for the frustration; our intention is to provide that information upfront. We previously had the 30-day limit more clearly signposted, but that was lost in translation when the website was updated recently. We've added notices in the docs to make that clear ahead of time. Thank you for the feedback. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#14 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AFK5QQX4CDD66VMZ3RSJSN3SWO6WBANCNFSM4VIQKCDA>.

Support Thanks for the reply. This is by far the best of the off line systems! As a lesson 1 Python writer 2 days of learning was invested in a system I found I cannot build up on. And - It took a while to see that I need not just use the command line but could find a python program to modify with GPIO etc Lots of us just copy paste and pray. We built up arduino and Pi - now going very commercial for IOT

You can always retrain the same Rhino model using console before the expiry to keep using it indefinitely. You just need to press the train button again!

And reload and test a remote raspberry Pi. Many Thanks Frank Marshall

[yousefamar]

This issue should be re-opened because it's still incredibly misleading. I just went down the same path that @FGMarshall went down.

As a side note, the practice itself doesn't really make sense either. I can appreciate that you guys are probably trying to keep some control over your product, considering picovoice is offline, but I don't think this is the way to do it. I think this 30 day constraint for personal use does nothing but hurt you, like @FGMarshall said. Your profits depend on the B2B play, and sabotaging your traction with the indie hacker community is akin to DRM in video games, pointless.

Consider this: if a commercial application really wanted to circumvent paying, they could trick their program into thinking it's within the 30 day limit. Even if not, it wouldn't be very hard to put e.g. libpv_rhino.so through Ghidra, find the function where it prints "your evaluation has expired", and simply replace the bit above that that does the subtraction between current time and expiry time, and wherever else it's checked -- they wouldn't even need to reverse-engineer your proprietary file formats. Use the law to protect yourself instead, if this even ever becomes a problem, which it won't if you shoot yourself in the foot as a product.

Anyway, that's just my two cents but I hope you think about it.