#mycroft — Public Fediverse posts

Over the summer our 6 year old asked me to read to him from The Official Ubuntu Book (which I co-authored). On the page about the #Mycroft assistant device, I mentioned I had one. He was entranced.

Well, yes, I do. A Mark 1. It's been in my closet since I got it. It might be too old to run #OVOS. Or the hardware is dodgy. Maybe I should consider #HiveMind 🤔 Hey, someone upgraded it to use a RPi4.

What kind of hole am I digging for myself here?

My test bed Mycroft / OpenVoiceOS installation is coming alongnicely. It's frustrating that MycroftAI's excellent online portal for managing skills and settings disappeared with the demise of the company. But I'm encouraged by the onscreen developments OVOS has inherited from Mycroft II.

#MycroftAI #Mycroft #OVOS #OpenVoiceOS
#opensource

Curious error installing #mycroft #ovos skills, several packages are seeking a json file, but using a bad line of code:

with open(f"{get_xdg_config_save_path()}/skills/{self.skill_id}/settings.json" "w") as f:

is clearly missing a comma, so Python dutifully seeks 'jsonw', but considering there are (so far) two skills that fail because of this, I'm puzzled as to where to look to fix and/or report the problem.

#funwithopensource

My new puzzle is revisiting an old puzzle - just before they collapsed, I very nearly had #MyCroft in a useful form, but then it all fell apart and was feared lost.

But now there's an active fork: https://openvoiceos.github.io with a flashy GUI and looks very promising, except that #OVOS won't see my HP laptop microphone (UbuntuStudio audio is pipewire, so that could be an issue, but it should emulate ALSA or pulseaudio!)

This is one of the reasons I've been a big supporter of #Mycroft in the past, and I'm still supporting #OVOS and #NeonAI. I think a voice driven UI (VUI) is important, but the biggest players in that market are Google and Amazon, and their motivation isn't improving the experience for the people using their devices, it's monetizing anything and everything they can. I'd love to see a new smart speaker (*cough* @PINE64 *cough*) that would support OVOS or NeonAI soon.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/amazon-wants-to-charge-a-subscription-fee-for-alexa-eventually/

I feel like this could be an opportunity for a more open option. Both Google and Amazon have seemingly lost some of their focus on this market because it turns out people aren't just going to ask their voice assistant to buy them something and trust that it's just all going to work out. An open option like #Neon or #OVOS could step in and cover the basic functions. Unfortunately with the demise of #Mycroft, there's no hardware to run it on other than PCs or the #Mark2.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3703729/whats-going-on-with-google-assistant.html

Support OpenVoiceOS as Nonprofit Association

https://gofund.me/4357e19b

#mycroftai #mycroft #openvoiceos #ovos

A new release of the #Mycroft software is now available. If you own a Mark 2 and you haven't moved to #OVOS or #NeonOS, you should probably update sooner rather than later.

* Add STT fallback to communicate directly with a free demo Google STT service.

* Add config switch that allows Mycroft to start up without valid pairing information.

* Add direct call to Weather API as fallback mechanism.

They're removing dependence on their backend, which is good. No idea how much longer it'll be there.