Perfect Not the Enemy of Good
The entire team is working hard to develop Mycroft’s software to the point where we can provide a working installation and open up the source code. We are getting pretty close. We’ve got solutions in place for most of the big pieces – Speech-To-Text (STT), Intent Parsing, Data Access and Text-To-Speech (TTS), but we’ve still got a long way to go.
Specifically we need to create an in-house STT solution, develop the user management application and complete the promised skills. That work is going to take some time.
On the hardware side the Mycroft team still needs to identify vendors for various components, cut injection molds for the enclosure and solve a variety of other logistics problems.
We are rapidly checking tasks off of our list, but we don’t plan to let “perfect” be the enemy of “good”. In April we are going to do two things for sure.
1. Ship the pre-release hardware to backers who signed up for it.
2. Open up as much source code as we can.
The goal is to get feedback from backers and engage with the open source community to start making Mycroft better. Will it be perfect? No. Will it have bugs? Yes. Lots of bugs? Yes. That said, having dozens of units out there with a 60% solution will help us to get to an 80% solution by July.
When will we have a 100% solution? That depends on a lot of things, including how well we communicate and engage the open source community. At a guess? We will be ready with a robust and powerful 100% solution by the end of 2017. Backers who purchased units for shipment in July will get their units on time and they will have most, if not all, of the features we highlighted during our Kickstarter.
Once we start getting more feedback and pull requests we’ll push updates to the units until they are feature complete. Then we’ll start improving them further by empowering the open source community to deploy new skills and abilities.
It is going to be a fun collaboration.
If you have not had the chance to pre-order a Mycroft yet head over to Indiegogo to get one of your own. We also have multipacks and software development kits.
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To get involved with the Mycroft discussion and to find out how to get involved head over to the community page and create an account.
Kris is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Mycroft. She helped develop and executed on the social media strategy for the Kickstarter and continues managing social media in her role as Social Media Manager at Mycroft today.