What has happened to the “voice assistant” in the gateway??? It has completely borked the Mycroft integration… I tried to turn on my lights last night by voice to Mycroft and all I got was an error from the gateway…
looked at it from the phone and the whole “voice” stuff is GONE from the UI…
Why did this happen and what needs to be done to get it back, as I spent a long time setting it all up!
The smart assistant experiment was actually removed in version 0.11, explained in the blog post here.
Voice control can still be achieved via add-ons and I think the Mycroft skill is currently being re-worked to use the Web Thing API rather than the (now removed) commands API.
Although I’m sad to see Kit the fox disappear from the UI, it was just an experiment and I do think the move makes sense. I understand there may be ongoing experiments around voice control going on inside Mozilla, so it may be that the smart assistant feature could return in a different form at a later date.
Perhaps someone could create a Web of Things skill for Firefox Voice for example…
It is sad that “updates” will completely destroy things that did work.
I normally NEVER allow automatic updates for exactly this reason… 99% of updates to software & UI’s these days make less functionality
Mine was stable, working, secure & happy, and I would have left it alone until I was READY to fiddle with it … now it is only good for controlling things from a phone or a laptop, so I may as well use the switch. ( and will do!)
Basically this is useless to me now until I get time to look at it , and that will not be soon
I have stayed with 0.11 because I too, use voice all the time. I use the voice-controller add-on, which is dependent on the integrated intent parser (still in 0.11), but I intend to install and test the Voco add-on with a test gateway running 0.12, to see if it will work. I’ll let you know the results.
Fortunately, the team at MATRIX Labs is working with Mozilla DeepSpeech engineers to create a new voice control add-on that still runs local, offering complete privacy, and takes advantage of Mozilla’s DeepSpeech project (fully open source).
I completely agree with you that I would have left the Kit Fox assistant experiment and the existing intent parsing in the gateway until these other voice control offerings were ready. But for those who don’t regularly use voice for control, I think they don’t realize how useful it is to the rest of us. I am keeping tabs on the upcoming voice solutions and I do hope they’ll be ready sometime soon. (I don’t know when, just crossing my fingers.)
In the meantime, I’ll reply here once I’ve confirmed that the Voco add-on works with 0.12.
Thanks… I don’t use the Mozilla IOT UI for voice control, but rather the functionality it provided to allow it to work with the Mycroft Opensource Voice assistant, which is another project. What has happened is that my overall voice assistant (Mycroft) cannot now communicate with MOZ IOT Gateway, which had been working for more than a year, without issue.
I am no programmer, but the two devices were playing nicely, and now it is dead, and I will have to wait until someone fixes it from scratch again…
It would be easier just to get rid of mycroft, get alexa, and get rid of the Moz IOT and just let Amazon talk to the switches, which is not the way it should be - giving everything to the corporations…
This should not be hard
Just to add to what Ben said…
The built-in voice assistant was removed with 0.11, a couple months ago. We kept the back-end API as an interim step until 0.12.
We gave Mycroft several months notice about this change and offered assistance, but never heard much back. See here:
- https://github.com/mozilla-iot/gateway/issues/1624
- https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-skills/pull/1193
As Kathy indicated, @anatal and @lissyx, along with some developers from MATRIX Labs, are working on an update to the “Voice control” add-on, which used the same API.
However, the Voco add-on (from @createcandle) should be working still.
We decided to remove the virtual assistant and commands API from the gateway for several reasons:
- It almost never saw any maintenance. While new capabilities were added to the gateway, the intent parser was still very basic and couldn’t handle most things.
- It was only ever an “experiment”.
- It was not a core piece of the gateway.
- Voice control is better served by other software, like add-ons or standalone services/devices such as Mycroft.
- Removing it lowered the maintenance burden for the team (which is just me).
Hi, I just saw my name being mentioned here, so I thought to reply just to set the expectations properly: I am not currently working on this addon neither anything related to voice for the gateway anymore (and it’s been like that for a while) and I don’t have any intent to do so. Unfortunately, I had many unsuccessful attempts in the past blocked and rejected by the core team, which led me to not foresee a positive outcome of trying this anymore. Others are totally free to reuse what was done, if necessary at all, of course.