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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

by 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...

by qchris 5y ago

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...