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Mycroft – An open-source voice assistant

431 points| doener | 6 years ago |mycroft.ai | reply

113 comments

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[+] lifty|6 years ago|reply
As far as I know Mycroft does its speech recognition in the cloud, so your voice has to leave your network unfortunately. This is the reason why I don't have a voice assistant yet. There was snips.ai which tried to solve this problem locally but they were acquired by Sonos.

edit: spelling

[+] lukifer|6 years ago|reply
I've been having great success building homebrew voice assistants with Rhasspy [0] and voice2json [1] (they're sister projects from the same maintainer). The code's not ready to share yet, but I have a voice-controlled Raspberry Pi music server in my car now, working 100% offline (got it ready just in time to never have to drive anywhere, lol).

[0] https://github.com/synesthesiam/rhasspy

[1] http://voice2json.org/

[+] hipitihop|6 years ago|reply
The pieces of Snips that were OSS before Sonos bought and ditched the community are being leveraged along with new work in Project Alice https://github.com/project-Alice-assistant It continues to strive to be modular and offline. By design, the choice of online/offline elements including Google ASR and Amazon TTS along with corresponding quality and privacy tradeoffs is your choice. Come give a hand.
[+] tekchip|6 years ago|reply
The default configuration is cloud based. However you do get to choose where your voice data goes. They also have a method to keep the TTS local and I haven't checked in on the project in a while but they were either working on or already had a local home server so you can make the whole system internal if you wish. I'd provide reference links but as noted site is down currently.

Edit: There are also several skills available that can point at full, local, downloads of wikipedia and the like. So if you prefer faster results and keeping some of your queries internal as a sort of hybrid thing that's an option as well.

[+] CodeMage|6 years ago|reply
I found about Mycroft through their Kickstarter project, Mycroft Mark II. What convinced me to back them was that they said that, theoretically, I should be able to self-host their server on my own hardware at home.

Unfortunately, they mismanaged Mark II so badly that I lost all faith in Mycroft in general.

[+] adamredwoods|6 years ago|reply
I can't wait for a community-driven, open-source data model that we can take offline and plug into any software adapter. With a little version control and some voluntary data samples, a large enough community could get it going.
[+] tobylane|6 years ago|reply
Last time this came up the options were the Mozilla TTS service or do it locally with tensorflow lite and DeepSpeech.
[+] kleiba|6 years ago|reply
Well, there is some current research in Europe at least on how to make voice assistant technology more respecting of their user's privacy: https://www.compriseh2020.eu/ It's still far from market-ready, though...
[+] specialist|6 years ago|reply
"As far as I know Mycroft does its speech recognition in the cloud..."

How practical would it be to recognize my most common commands, eg "resume podcast", offline?

[+] Erlich_Bachman|6 years ago|reply
This is a major drawback of mycroft and I really hope they fix it soon.
[+] antonzabirko|6 years ago|reply
Your voice is already compromised if you use a smartphone or windows/Mac with a mic.
[+] juriansluiman|6 years ago|reply
Mycroft as software is used by a small group of users and seems pretty stable. More features are continuously added and the design principles look promising (open source, as private as possible).

The biggest problem is their hardware: they have a Mycroft v1, (to me personally) a prototype alike piece of hardware. There have been successful campaigns for a v2 release, with new hardware and an improved design.

However, they fail to work with reliable partners and there's still no working device which resembles the final production level. I have been a backer of the indigogo campaign but it's frustrating they postpone their Mycroft v2 every time again. I really hope the can deliver the device at some point, but they keep rewriting software and if they ship, the hardware is pretty outdated probably.

[+] tekchip|6 years ago|reply
It's true v1 was more of a proof of concept device. The core hardware target has always been the raspberry pi family of devices since they are pretty well ubiquitous. 2-3 is the current set. Base software is linux so if your audio devices, mic and speaker, work with Linux then you're pretty well good to go. Most microphone hats for Pi are supported. I use the Google Voicekit AIY v1 with raspberry pi 3 b+. Works a treat.

As with most open source efforts(especially early on) there's a lot of tinkering and DIY at the get go and they've designed their product to be supportive of this. Their "retail" devices are, much like Googles intent with Nexus, intended to be a best possible target for other vendors to target including the DIY crowd. Whether that's the right way to come at it is open to debate but the premise that they don't have a set hardware target is at best misleading.

Edit: Link to hardware spec https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft-ai/get-mycr...

[+] bronco21016|6 years ago|reply
I think perhaps it’s hard to hit a hardware target when the software is still in a pretty big state of change. It’s hard to say what hardware will be needed and what is the best compromise between hardware performance and the DeepSpeech NN for STT. DeepSpeech is still in development as well.

I think the priority needs to be getting the STT to a good, neural net backed, open source engine. Once the software is stabilized I think there’s room for a whole ecosystem of hardware interfaces.

[+] leppr|6 years ago|reply
This is already a step-up from Google Home devices in that you can trust it's not sending audio to Google outside of what you intend to, but I'll be properly excited when the Open-Source speech-to-text component is working[1] and I don't have to send my voice to Google at all.

[1]: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/over...

[+] tekchip|6 years ago|reply
I might be wrong so grain of salt. The main website is down. I believe the open source STT was working and in. As with many community projects it relies on folks contributing time to update documentation and unfortunately Mycroft hasn't received the love of other projects so I believe, again I may be wrong, that this documentation is outdated.
[+] reeeeee|6 years ago|reply
I get a Database Error on the homepage. Hug of death?
[+] reality101|6 years ago|reply
Error establishing a database connection. And it didn't say that in clear voice.
[+] vini|6 years ago|reply
Wordpress without cache plugin + HN traffic = downtime =)
[+] RMPR|6 years ago|reply
Not really the first one though :p

https://github.com/rcbyron/hey-athena-client/commit/50b37628... (2015)

Vs

https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-core/commit/8e470ce7c15... (2016)

Jokes aside, it's a great work, I'll probably try it in my spare time.

[+] goda90|6 years ago|reply
Home assistant is a home automation tool, not a voice assistant. You can even hook up Mycroft to Home Assistant.
[+] huseyinkeles|6 years ago|reply
Home Assistant has nothing to do with being a voice assistant.
[+] nojvek|6 years ago|reply
I’m getting “error establishing database connection”
[+] xigency|6 years ago|reply
I made a fully offline voice assistant on a Raspberry Pi with Pocket Sphinx and Festival Lite glued together with Python. Performance wasn’t great but it was a fun project nonetheless.
[+] bradhe|6 years ago|reply
Bummer their site is still down. Not sure why a marketing site needs to maintain connectivity to a database to render the homepage?
[+] aaronax|6 years ago|reply
Most web pages need to be able to be updated. I think the two most popular options for that are a CMS or a static site generator. In general it is easier for "less technical" users to update the content in a CMS. Hence you get a database for rendering.

Alternate analysis: Personally it is not surprising to me at all that a marketing website would be run on Wordpress, Drupal, etc. And therefore it is quite clear that a database connection would be needed.

[+] tekchip|6 years ago|reply
The website is down but a lot of work happens at the forums and the forums are still up. If you're interested in some insight in to the community around the project have a look over there. https://community.mycroft.ai/
[+] riedel|6 years ago|reply
Stupid question: has anyone hooked up a voice assistant sucessfully against upnp renderers and media servers? Would be willing to invest some effort if I could use them to browse music. Seems quite tricky particularly for non native speakers :)
[+] Krasnol|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if you can change it's name now.

Last time I asked, the dev asked me back how much I'd be willing to pay for it...

[+] js4ever|6 years ago|reply
Site is down, any WordPress and php based stack will crash after 30-50 simultaneous requests ...

I am amazed that this doesn't seems to bother anyone ... And adding a cache layer is not a real solution ...

And in other parts of the internet there is few stacks delivering 5k to 150k rps per core without cache ...

But still everyone use WordPress ...

[+] vinniejames|6 years ago|reply
This is flat out false, WP is able to handle much more than this. I've scaled WordPress personally to 10M+ users per day
[+] bwl|6 years ago|reply
Would be very cool of them to at least alias the mycroft.xxx domain
[+] tacomplain|6 years ago|reply
is there any good terminal assistant? something that accepts these kinds of queries but with in a cli, preferably without the need of constant internet connection
[+] trynewideas|6 years ago|reply
Mycroft has a curses CLI: `start-mycroft.sh cli` or `mycroft-start cli` if services are running, `start-mycroft.sh debug` or `mycroft-start debug` to start services and go straight into the CLI.
[+] SubiculumCode|6 years ago|reply
So maybe MyCroft and Mozilla should get together?