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Mycroft-core v21.2.1 released

By September 14, 2021 No Comments

A new version of mycroft-core has been released. As its name suggests this is the code that brings together all the technologies to make Mycroft an end-to-end voice interaction system.

Being a “point release” (v21.2.0 > v21.2.1) the purpose is to fix bugs and improve existing functionality. Much of this work won’t be very visible to the average person unless they know what to look for, but we wanted to highlight a few of the bigger additions.

XDG Compliance

Mycroft-core v21.2.1 is an iterative release with a whole smattering of goodies. Most noticeably mycroft-core is becoming compliant with the XDG Base Directory specification. This moves some files from their traditional directories, to those defined by the XDG spec:

 

  • settings to $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/mycroft, which most of the time is ~/.config/mycroft
  • data to $XDG_DATA_DIRS/mycroft, which most of the time is ~/.local/share/mycroft
  • cache to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/mycroft, which most of the time is ~/.cache/mycroft

 

Mycroft Skills currently remain at /opt/mycroft/skills/ however this will also be moving to an XDG compliant directory shortly.

Farsi Support

Thanks largely to the efforts of @Hkalbasi Mycroft now includes initial Farsi support. 

For any new language this requires both direct translation of existing vocabulary and dialogue, as well as the localization of common parsing and formatting functions. These functions enable Mycroft to understand and express things like numbers and dates in natural speech.

The other good news – if you’re working on your own natural language project and you use Lingua Franca, our multi-lingual parsing and formatting library, then Farsi support is available for your project too!

Browser improvements

A really simple yet powerful feature of the Mark II is the inclusion of a browser. This helps unlock a near infinite range of possibilities for new ways to make use of your voice assistant. This release saw two improvements to that browser.

Fullscreen views are now available – allowing videos or other browser-based content to be shown in all their fullscreen glory.

Web pages may now request access to the camera or microphone. These requests are presented to you as a small pop-up ensuring that websites can’t activate these without your explicit permission. 

Testing improvements

A series of improvements have also been made to the Voight Kampff test suite to make them more reliable and robust. The better our tests, the quicker we can push other updates.