My Home Assistant Voice Preview has arrived! Prepare for all the shenanigans.
This one is for @ryanleesipes and @popey, thanks to @micahilbery for the reference
Edit; said reference: https://youtu.be/D5J7vVQNkCw
#MyCroft
Over the summer our 6 year old asked me to read to him from The Official Ubuntu Book (which I co-authored). On the page about the #Mycroft assistant device, I mentioned I had one. He was entranced.
Well, yes, I do. A Mark 1. It's been in my closet since I got it. It might be too old to run #OVOS. Or the hardware is dodgy. Maybe I should consider #HiveMind 🤔 Hey, someone upgraded it to use a RPi4.
What kind of hole am I digging for myself here?
My eyes are so itchy and watery (presumably due to seasonal allergies) that I haven't been able to get much work done in the past few days. I'm writing this toot with my eyes closed most of the time. 😑
Dear #accessibility hivemind, is there an easy way to have #Orca working with a natural-sounding text-to-speech voice, that is not eSpeak, but rather something like #MyCroft's Mimic3 ?
What's the state of the art for screenreader TTS voices on #Linux and how do I get it in #Fedora?
#SCIFI #Heinlein 's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is substantial and I think still well worth reading for entertainment as well.
Buried in it is the assumption that an intelligent computer, one which developed a consciousness and personality, would display male or female traits, or traits we interpret this. Wyoh: Mike's a girl!
That's in the context of an exploration of humour, a long list of jokes funny/not funny.
But if a computer isn't #binary , what is?
Oh, and my daughters would really like a a female sounding wake word other than Alexa. My sons don't seem to care, they all are happy with Mycroft. That's probably because I've been using Mycroft since #Mycroft was mycroft.ai. I'm partial to Selene, but that's only because it's from the same novel as Mycroft. Also, I realize I could create my own wake word. I might even do that if the alarm functionality gets added. 😉
Wer #MyCroft noch nicht kennt: Da findet ihr für noch so jede Torrent-Seite, Foren wie MyDealz etc. – und übrigens auch die ARD- und ZDF-Mediatheken – in Firefox installierbare Suchmaschinen, seit so ziemlich 20 Jahren. Die lassen sich dann in den FF-Einstellungen noch mit Suchkürzel einstellen: So suche ich mit "ard sendungsname" direkt in der Mediathek.
Habe gerade eine neue Suchmaschine in Firefox über die gute alte #MyCroft-Webseite installieren wollen und bin schier verzweifelt, weil sie dort ihre Anleitung nicht aktualisiert haben, bzw. aktueller #Firefox das Installieren so unnötig verkompliziert, bzw. unlogisch löst.
Statt über das alte …-Menü einen Eintrag zu finden, müsst ihr jetzt beim Installationsschritt einen Rechtsklick in die URL-Leiste machen.
@jwildeboer I believe it's @emilymbender that refers to LLMs as "text extruders", which is a turn of phrase I like. Where I see LLMs being potentially useful is for an idea I remember from the #Mycroft days they called Personas. The idea was that their voice assistant could be given particular "personalities" It was also something i remember from the Ready Player One book (not the movie). LLMs could reduce persona responses down to some system prompts.
Just dug out my old #PinebookPro. It's so far out of date it'll probably be faster to just backup the files and start it from scratch. It still has an old install of #Mycroft on it.
@omgubuntu I don't know why, but this reminded me about #Mycroft and how they have gone silent of late. It seemed like there was so much promise about it. Embedding it with a desktop would have been so nice - "hey Mycroft, turn off porch light" from your desktop or laptop would nice. Also, didn't @popey lend his voice to the project?
@MichaelPorter @DoomsdaysCW
Yes.
Amazon had options.
1. To send everything that is said.
2. To send what follows directly after a passphrase.
And they've gone with spying 24/7 ?
(There is an open-source, non-spying smart speaker assistant - last I looked it was at the IT- hobbyist stage. #Mycroft. )
The OpenVoiceOS Foundation aims to enable open-source privacy and customization for voice assistants
@grueproof I don't know how much attention you pay to #HomeAssistant, but last year was their "Year of the Voice". They added a significant amount of functionality that replicates what #Mycroft was doing. The one I've been super tempted by lately is this little guy:
https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
Still obviously a Preview Edition (it's in the name after all), but looks pretty slick regardless. I've got other hardware running around the house that interfaces with HA, but not as smoothly.
@grueproof I guess that depends on what you mean by "replacement". For my #Mycroft Mark II I replaced the OS with Neon, which worked really well.
https://neon.ai/NeonAIforMycroftMarkII/
I also ran Mycroft directly on my PCs, but Neon isn't as good at that. I replaced those installations with ollama, which works fine-ish but like most LLMs is out of date on current information, but works for general questions.
Regarding hardware, I've been using a variety of different things, all tied to #HomeAssistant.
Still looking for a functional FOSS speech-driven #assistant that's not Alexa etc.
Seems there's much in development, but I'm not a developer. Tried Leon, but that needs additional code adding to it that I've no clue about.
I just want to verbally look up things and have them read back to me, and maybe integrate some home #automation if possible.
#Mycroft running on a R-Pi 4 was promising, but that seems to have folded...
Not doing very well so far. Anyone else?
an update on the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse book about Mycroft Holmes I mentioned the other day.
I finished the other book I was reading. it had a nice final twist.
I dug right into the Mycroft book and by the time I got through the first chapter I knew I was going to like it. I’m almost 1/3 of the way through it now and it keeps getting better.
both books set in the Victorian era. 1st one archaeology, 2nd on Mycroft’s government job.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and screenwriter Anna Waterhouse have collaborated on a series of books about Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft. I’ve downloaded the first in the series and, as soon as I finish the last 30% of the book I’m currently reading I’ll be diving into it.
can hardly wait. big Sherlock fan here and always loved the stories with Mycroft in them.
I just reimaged my #Mycroft Mark 2 with the latest Neon AI because..... it's Friday and I wanted to?
My test bed Mycroft / OpenVoiceOS installation is coming alongnicely. It's frustrating that MycroftAI's excellent online portal for managing skills and settings disappeared with the demise of the company. But I'm encouraged by the onscreen developments OVOS has inherited from Mycroft II.
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