4 ms·

I've heard of Mycroft before but have no personal experience with it: https://mycroft.ai https://mycroft.ai It seems like they have an open source client that

by jffry 5y ago

I've heard of Mycroft before but have no personal experience with it: https://mycroft.ai https://mycroft.ai It seems like they have an open source client that you can run on your own hardware but it's still dependent on the backend services that Mycroft-the-company provides. Perhaps their privacy stance is more palatable to you, though? I think there used to be a project that was fully on-device but it got bought and consumed by Sonos

totetsu 5y ago
I tried it on a RPI, but at that time it was limited by not being able to use microphone from bluetooth.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
I'm in the same situation as OP and spent a weekend chasing this particular rabbit hole a few months ago. Mycroft was the best option I found, but: * changing the wake word was a pain * having a Home account is essentially mandatory (kind of defeating the point) * speech synthesis was really bad * It needed a lot of rhetorical help to get useful responses. Just getting to that point involved several hours of fairly hardcore debugging and even then basic issues like reliable mic input still existed. I also couldn't find reasonably priced (<$100) speakers/mics in an Alexa form factor, but it wouldn't be fair to blame that on the mycroft team.
russnes 5y ago
Technically you should be able to run your own back-end, but I ended up giving up on this endeavor when I tried a few months ago. It should be doable if you give it a few good days, but it wasn't very well documented at least when I tried, and there's a lot of different parts you have to get working. After you get it to work, I'm not sure if your server would have a worse data set for speech recognition etc, maybe, maybe not. I'm guessing it should be all right because they are using a Mozilla free data set (which you contribute to by default I think, if you use their server).
qchris 5y ago
I played around with their open source code a few years ago, and found it, well, operable, if not particularly useful. On the flip side, I do not, I repeat, DO NOT recommend giving their team money for pretty much any reason. They've been struggling to put together any working hardware (and promising the opposite) for years through a genuine comedy of errors. I think the most recent design iteration of MycroftV2 is something like a Raspberry Pi on a daughterboard in a 3D-printed case. I still check in on their blog and subreddit every few months to see what's changed, and everytime I'm rewarded with additional details on what seems to be one of the most incompetent engineering organizations I've ever heard of.
- michaelnik 5y ago
  It is a small team, maybe few people? On the other hand, Amazon has 10k people on Alexa[1]. One wonders how much is worth info they are sucking out of households.... [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-employees-working-on-alexa-echo-1542138284 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-...
  - qchris 5y ago
    That could be it, I suppose. Sorry, I'm not trying to make this a personal attack on the team (I don't know any of them), and I'm not personally invested in their success or failure (I haven't purchased any of their stuff or invested in them). I just think that it would be cool to have an easy-to-use, hackable home assistant that does most of its computation locally, and that's what they're (supposed to be) building. In a lot of ways, it doesn't really matter why they're not producing results, so much as the fact that they're not producing them. I mean, check out the list of remaining action items in their last "Production Update"[1]. This came over 8 months since shipping what were supposed to be the Mark II devkits, and almost four years(!) after they announced work on the Mark II in early 2018 [2], which has since gone through about a zillion different design changes. I won't claim to be an expert, but having had even a bit of experience with product development of this kind, this is not the happy path to getting consumer electronics shipped. [1] https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-manufacturing-and-product-update/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-manufacturing-and-product-up... [2] https://mycroft.ai/blog/specs-new-voice-assistant-device-see-mark-ii/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/specs-new-voice-assistant-device-see...
bluGill 5y ago
I have a mycroft mark1. It is based on the rasberry pi, and as they are wont to do the SD gave out (or got corrupted in a power outage?) and I haven't tried to fix it after a couple years. It works, but it is tricky to get it to wake up, you have to be close to it and speak up, no using it across the room. It is a neat trick, but I never found a use for it that was worth making it work. I backed the mark2 on kickstarter which they have been promising is better and will ship anytime now - for a few years...
michaelnik 5y ago
I use MyCroft/PiCroft (Pi4) + PS2 mic array (15$), it is cheap and relatively easy to hack in Python/Git. I believe it uses Mozilla's voice service. Has no ads. Commands which work nicely which we use all the time: "Hi Mycroft, set timer to X minutes." "play news", "set alarm to 6 am", "what's the temperature?", "will it rain?", "what's the time in Paris?". I wrote METAR and TAF module for it to get more detailed weather (and learn some Python).

by jffry 5y ago

totetsu 5y ago

I tried it on a RPI, but at that time it was limited by not being able to use microphone from bluetooth.

AlotOfReading 5y ago

I'm in the same situation as OP and spent a weekend chasing this particular rabbit hole a few months ago. Mycroft was the best option I found, but: * changing the wake word was a pain * having a Home account is essentially mandatory (kind of defeating the point) * speech synthesis was really bad * It needed a lot of rhetorical help to get useful responses. Just getting to that point involved several hours of fairly hardcore debugging and even then basic issues like reliable mic input still existed. I also couldn't find reasonably priced (<$100) speakers/mics in an Alexa form factor, but it wouldn't be fair to blame that on the mycroft team.

russnes 5y ago

Technically you should be able to run your own back-end, but I ended up giving up on this endeavor when I tried a few months ago. It should be doable if you give it a few good days, but it wasn't very well documented at least when I tried, and there's a lot of different parts you have to get working. After you get it to work, I'm not sure if your server would have a worse data set for speech recognition etc, maybe, maybe not. I'm guessing it should be all right because they are using a Mozilla free data set (which you contribute to by default I think, if you use their server).

qchris 5y ago

I played around with their open source code a few years ago, and found it, well, operable, if not particularly useful. On the flip side, I do not, I repeat, DO NOT recommend giving their team money for pretty much any reason. They've been struggling to put together any working hardware (and promising the opposite) for years through a genuine comedy of errors. I think the most recent design iteration of MycroftV2 is something like a Raspberry Pi on a daughterboard in a 3D-printed case. I still check in on their blog and subreddit every few months to see what's changed, and everytime I'm rewarded with additional details on what seems to be one of the most incompetent engineering organizations I've ever heard of.

michaelnik 5y ago
It is a small team, maybe few people? On the other hand, Amazon has 10k people on Alexa[1]. One wonders how much is worth info they are sucking out of households.... [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-employees-working-on-alexa-echo-1542138284 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-...
- qchris 5y ago
  That could be it, I suppose. Sorry, I'm not trying to make this a personal attack on the team (I don't know any of them), and I'm not personally invested in their success or failure (I haven't purchased any of their stuff or invested in them). I just think that it would be cool to have an easy-to-use, hackable home assistant that does most of its computation locally, and that's what they're (supposed to be) building. In a lot of ways, it doesn't really matter why they're not producing results, so much as the fact that they're not producing them. I mean, check out the list of remaining action items in their last "Production Update"[1]. This came over 8 months since shipping what were supposed to be the Mark II devkits, and almost four years(!) after they announced work on the Mark II in early 2018 [2], which has since gone through about a zillion different design changes. I won't claim to be an expert, but having had even a bit of experience with product development of this kind, this is not the happy path to getting consumer electronics shipped. [1] https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-manufacturing-and-product-update/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-manufacturing-and-product-up... [2] https://mycroft.ai/blog/specs-new-voice-assistant-device-see-mark-ii/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/specs-new-voice-assistant-device-see...

bluGill 5y ago

I have a mycroft mark1. It is based on the rasberry pi, and as they are wont to do the SD gave out (or got corrupted in a power outage?) and I haven't tried to fix it after a couple years. It works, but it is tricky to get it to wake up, you have to be close to it and speak up, no using it across the room. It is a neat trick, but I never found a use for it that was worth making it work. I backed the mark2 on kickstarter which they have been promising is better and will ship anytime now - for a few years...

michaelnik 5y ago

I use MyCroft/PiCroft (Pi4) + PS2 mic array (15$), it is cheap and relatively easy to hack in Python/Git. I believe it uses Mozilla's voice service. Has no ads. Commands which work nicely which we use all the time: "Hi Mycroft, set timer to X minutes." "play news", "set alarm to 6 am", "what's the temperature?", "will it rain?", "what's the time in Paris?". I wrote METAR and TAF module for it to get more detailed weather (and learn some Python).