Mycroft?

[WJefferson]

It's not the looks, it's the functionality. I spent some time experinemting with the API and found it's very limited, voice recognition is pretty basic and not as inteligent as Google/Alexa, TTS voice quality is terrible too. My gut feeling - given the size of the company and amount of resources it will take a few years to get it to usefull level. Assuming they stay in business.

Don't want to be negative - and I genuinely did want to create Mycroft plugin, but I suspect it would be waste of time.

I saw the videos of it in action and the developers try to play off the limitations by saying it's due to having to process locally, unlike Alexa. It does look unrefined and something you'd see from 2010, unfortunately. They don't have millions of dollars to throw at it like Amazon, so I agree that it may take some time to refine it. I would still go without an AI assistant than have one that eavesdrops.

[alexbk66]

You may not care if they know your lights are on or off, but do you care that it's monitoring (and we now know it's selectively transmitting to Amazon servers for quality assurance and AI improvement) everything you are saying even BEFORE the Alexa wake word? I'll take an ugly looking thing that values privacy within my home over any artistic masterpiece (which Alexa certainly is not).

It's not the looks, it's the functionality. I spent some time experinemting with the API and found it's very limited, voice recognition is pretty basic and not as inteligent as Google/Alexa, TTS voice quality is terrible too. My gut feeling - given the size of the company and amount of resources it will take a few years to get it to usefull level. Assuming they stay in business.

Don't want to be negative - and I genuinely did want to create Mycroft plugin, but I suspect it would be waste of time.

[WJefferson]

You may not care if they know your lights are on or off, but do you care that it's monitoring (and we now know it's selectively transmitting to Amazon servers for quality assurance and AI improvement) everything you are saying even BEFORE the Alexa wake word? I'll take an ugly looking thing that values privacy within my home over any artistic masterpiece (which Alexa certainly is not).

[simonmason]

Gave up on it a long time ago. I am using Alexa now - with Voice Monkey. Works great. And I don't care if Amazon knows that my lights turned on and off! I see that Mycroft now has a Mark 2 shipping at end of year. They couldn't have made that look any uglier!

[alexbk66]

Just FYI, I'm looking into creating Mycroft plugin, not sure yet how much work is involved.

[simonmason]

I assume the speed is related to the PI. But I have only just begin to play with this so I am not positive I have everything optimized. Response time for commands to homeseer is very fast. However if I asked Mycroft for something like the weather report, I see it pick up the voice command instantly in the console, I then see it display the text that it is going to say in less than a second. But it could be 2 seconds before it actually speaks.

I am using a PI 3b. I see that they now support PI 3b+. I am only testing on the PI. My intent ultimately would be to use the Mycroft Mark 2 if and when I deployed in my house. The Mark II apparently runs on a Xilinx quad-core processor. I have no idea how that compares to a PI in processing power - it sounds faster!!

I went with the Jabra because it is an all in one mic/speaker combo. I thought that if the PI worked out then I could actually use this throughout the house by leaving the Jabra out on the counter and hiding the PI.

Is it slow because of the PI ? can it be tried on another SBC like the odroid xu4? or something like the lattepanda delta ?



My last question if somebody could answer that ? Can the compute part of multiple mycrofts in a house be centralized to a unique server ( faster and more resources) then sent back to each mycroft respectively?

simonmason can't you use the eight microphones from the Matrix ( here posted by Rylo ) in your matrix project? or are they incompatible?

[simonmason]

I am using a Jabra 410. Works well. Quality of the voices in picroft are not so good - and it seems a little on the slow side. I have gotten the homeseer link working and I can control lights, run events, etc.

[Beowulf]

simonmason, have you had a chance to try out a different spearker/mic unit in your Pi?

[simonmason]

It does look interesting and I definitely think this is the way to go vs. a closed eco system like an Alexa. I have started down the Mycroft path - it seems to be a little more established than this other option - in terms of developer community and hardware development.

[Rylo]

I have been wanting to get one of these..

[simonmason]

I have built my first mycroft using a PI - haven't gotten it working yet as the Jabra 410 I used for the mic/speaker combo isn't working with Picroft, but hopefully that is a momentary bump in the road.

[Beowulf]

I'm going to keep an eye out here and watch for any other threads discussing the MyCroft. I haven't come across this before but really like the idea of an open-source effective voice control and assistant. If these deliver I would definitely pick up a few

Also, I've been hoping to see how well HS3 (HS4?) can be controlled via python. I use it all the time in my job (mostly procedural but a little OO) and play with basic game programming with the kids in Py. I had seen examples from HS2 that used it but it seems to have dropped off the radar with the latest release a few years back. I hadn't looked around github yet to see what may be out there but I'll try to do that.

jon00 I’d assume , on Linux, that i need to install a desktop on my Machine to be able to install the navigator app. Or maybe there’s an obsure coding way to do this headless haha