The Mycroft team has been quite busy the last couple of weeks. We released a new video, open sourced a project at Mycroft’s core, made incredible progress on the Mycroft hardware, as well as moved forward on the TTS (text-to-speech) portion of the software stack.
Mycroft on the Desktop
Keeping with our promised stretch goal on Kickstarter, last week we showed a feature video highlighting Mycroft on the Linux desktop. The team has had a great deal of fun using Mycroft on the desktop for testing, and we are extremely excited about getting the community in on the project in April.
First Open Source Intent Parser, Adapt, Released by Mycroft Team
Last Wednesday, the 6th, at 3pm Central Time we released the Adapt Intent Parser to the world. Adapt allows developers to take natural language input and turn it into machine readable data structures. The Adapt library will allow many developers to take their applications to the next level of interaction, and there are already ideas in the Mycroft community as to where Adapt can be used in existing applications.
Adapt is popular on Github
Since its release Adapt has received quite a lot of attention from the open source community: CTO Ryan Sipes talked about it on popular podcast Linux Unplugged; the Adapt Documentation site received over 10,000 views in less than a week; and the code repository on Github has received nearly 5,000 views, has been cloned 193 times, and has been forked 27 times.
The Voice of Mycroft
Software engineer Jonathan D’Orleans of the Mycroft team has been working hard to ensure that Mycroft’s voice is the highest quality possible while ensuring that the community is able to contribute to the voices and voice software. To that end, this week the software team made great progress on speeding up voice synthesis and the team now has a clear path to continue to make Mycroft sound more natural going forward.
Production Prototype
This week also brings the project to a new level as the team works to finish the production prototype, which should be nearly identical to the production units we ship to our crowdfunding backers. This is very exciting as the unit will serve as a solid platform for the development team to focus on, iterating so that the software on the device is the best experience possible. The team has learned a great deal through this process about working on a hardware project, and is extremely proud of the incredible progress we’ve made thus far.
All in all the Mycroft project has made considerable leaps and bounds this first month of the new year, and it’s not over yet! Many great opportunities continue to arise for Mycroft as a project and as a company, and we hope to continue to have great news to share on various fronts as January comes to a close, so stay tuned!
I’ll leave you with the awesome Adapt introduction video until next week!
CTO of the Mycroft project. A long time open source software developer Ryan has contributed to the Solus Project, GtK, DuckDuckGo and many others. He is a former systems administrator for the Northeast Kansas Library System. Ryan has extensive experience with datacenter management including the construction and maintenance of high availability virtualization systems.