GrapheneOS and the Pixel 6 tensor processor

supersonic

To what extent is GrapheneOS able to take advantage of the TPU part of the processor on the Pixel 6 phones? Are there any limitations in terms of what the TPU can do when compared to running Android on it? For example, are Google's machine learning algorithms like HDRnet present in any way? Does GrapheneOS have any of its own ML features built-in? I'm similarly curious about how GrapheneOS does/doesn't use the Titan M2 security core. Thanks in advance for any info.

Whatnoww

AFAIK GrapheneOS is missing the blob that the Pixel recorder uses to do fast transcription, though it seems to be working only for English at the moment on Android 13. Might be detecting it as an older Pixel?

lahisdlais

Whatnoww
I am super interested in the answer for this. I would need the offline Translations features.
Did you installed the Google services?

Whatnoww

lahisdlais@ Yes. I have sandboxed play services installed.

Wonderfall

There was actually a missing library in the previous GrapheneOS 12 releases preventing Google apps from initializing the TPU with models. That is no longer an issue in GrapheneOS 13 and that library is now included. GrapheneOS has the same hardware capabilities as stock OS, for instance, you can use the same enhanced offline speech recognition features.

GrapheneOS makes use of all the features provided by Titan M2, as it did for previous Pixel iterations & the original Titan M. That's a core aspect of the security of Android on Pixel.

spiral

Wonderfall ok, so I downloaded Speech Services, then download my language of choice, and that's it? How can I make sure that network permissions are revoked and it's not sending info back to Google?

supersonic

Wonderfall Awesome, thank you for this info

Wonderfall

spiral There's no guarantee that you can prevent Google from exfiltrating anything since IPC is a thing (I assume you're using Play services w/ network), but in all likelihood they won't do that. They don't need to anyway since a considerable amount of users will be using their service to back up recordings.

The point of getting Google Recorder to work was to show that GrapheneOS can leverage the same hardware features as stock OS, and it can. Sadly I'm not aware of any alternative at this point (that works offline). Whether you trust Google enough or not to use it is up to you. :)

spiral

Wonderfall understood, thanks.