Any news about a collaboration with Mycroft?

WebThings
#1

Mycroft is a FOSS voice assistant. It started using Mozilla’s Deep Speech this spring and the company behind it joined Mozilla’s all hands meeting. According to them, the Things Gateway uses Mycroft’s intent parser.

While I have read about these ties several times on the pages of Mycroft, Mozilla’s teams seem silent about them. The English Mozilla blog does not seem to mention Mycroft a single time, just two non-English posts thank them for their help in gathering Common Voice data (German; Polish). This Discourse instance brings up 4 entries when searching for “Mycroft” – none of them in the IoT section.

As a user I would like to use the Things Gateway as a web interface for Mycroft (e.g. forward voice and text commands to Mycroft). And – not to forget the other way around – theme a Mycroft with the new fox assistant.

Does either side have plans to integrate with the other?
If one was to write an integration, am I correct that it should be a Mycroft skill? (assumption based on this message for a google assistant question)

Is this a collaboration which is mainly beneficial to Mycroft’s corporate side?

Is the business model/ business practice of Mycroft AI, Inc. unacceptable for being mentioned by Mozilla? (They offer hardware bundles as IndieGoGo rewards and they promote those as if one was buying a product instead of funding a project at the user’s risk.)

Looking forward to a reply. In the meantime, I start training Mycroft the wake word “Hey Foxy” :wave::fox_face:. (Or does the assistant already have an official name?)

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Local voice control using Snips/Mycroft/Snowboy/etc
#2

The intent parser used by experimental smart assistant in the Things Gateway runs on top of Mycroft’s open source Adapt project.

We were very happy to have Steve Penrod from Mycroft attend our latest Mozilla All Hands meetup (as described in his blog post) and we discussed the idea of creating a Mycroft skill for controlling web things, but as far as I know nobody is working on that yet. If you’re interested in working on that then let us know!

There are currently no plans to use the experimental smart assistant UI of the gateway as a front end for another voice assistant.

Ben

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#3

Hi Ben, thanks for this great thread.

As it’s a little old, so I’d like to ask you for an update on this issue.

I was investigating how to set up a voice assistant solution that integrates with Mozilla IoT Gateway. I came across Mycroft, and I checked that there was a Mozilla WebThings Gateway skill for Mycroft that was published, and that integrates with Mozilla’s gateway…

Unluckily, after a lot of tinkering around with hardware and sound configuration, once that I finally managed to make Mycroft run smoothly, when listing available skills on Mycroft, I discovered that Mozilla’s skill was no longer available. What has happened to justify this step back? Has there been any issue worth to mention? Will the Mozilla skill for Mycroft come back at any time?

In case that Mycroft and Mozilla do no get on well any longer, and hence there won’t be a comeback for this skill, are there other alternatives for a voice assistant that integrates with Mozilla IoT Gateway? And I’d like to flee as much as possible from non-privacy-aware options… If that’s still possible: that’s the reason why I value so much Mozilla’s recommendations on this sense. Thx a lot!

#4

With the 0.12 release, we dropped the API that the Mycroft skill was using to control the gateway. Some community members are working to update the skill to use the standard API, but it’s not quite ready yet. When it is, the skill will be back in the store.

For more discussion, see here: Voice control is gone from the update!