New Voice!
The long-awaited new feminine voice for Mycroft is now available! Members at home.mycroft.ai can choose the ‘American Female’ voice at https://home.mycroft.ai/#/setting/basic. The Alan Pope voice still is and always will be available for all. (#1173)
Default skills…redefined
The core default skills are now defined by a list on the mycroft-skills repo (see https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-skills/blob/master/DEFAULT-SKILLS). This decouples the list from a specific build, allowing new defaults to be added at any time. Additionally, platforms can also have unique defaults — for example allowing a KDE installation of Mycroft to pull down KDE/desktop related skills (see https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-skills/blob/master/DEFAULT-SKILLS.kde). The current list of platforms is ‘picroft’, ‘mark-1’ and ‘kde’.
The list of default skills is defined by the community run Mycroft Skills Team.
Portuguese Internationalization
Fixes
- The Chromecast audio backend would stop playback on initial connection, sometimes interfering with existing playback. (#1123)
- ISSUE #1141: The TTS audio cache could be cleared before or during playback, occasionally interfering with responses (especially when the disk is nearly full). Also allowed minimum_size not just a minimum percentage, which is less useful when dealing with very large drives. (#1168)
- Upgraded to Padatious 0.3.6, fixing issues with registering entities. (#1149)
- Modified dev_setup.sh build of py2cairo and pygobject to avoid “too many arguments” message on Arch Linux. Thanks @DarkPhoenix! (#1157)
- The next spoken utterance was consumed if no speech was occurring when mycroft.audio.stop_speaking() was called. (#1167)
- Error messages were spoken during skill download even when “speak=False” was specified (#1183)
Misc
- Major refactor of the mycroft.configuration module. This clarifies and simplifies some of the logic and allows patches to survive a reload of the config. (#1110, #1176, #1179)
- Allow msm.sh, mycroft-start.sh and mycroft-stop.sh to be invoked from different working directories. Thanks @roadriverrail! (#1021)
- Added g++ to dev_setup.sh dependencies (#1150)
- Reduced some of the ‘noise’ in the logs. (#1180)
- Disabled experimental “Location” context from the default. It was lingering and causing confusion at times, but is still available for more experimentation. (#1181)
- In the ‘mycroft-use’ utility, separated the connection between the mycroft-core implementation and the backend. Now specifying ‘stable’ and ‘unstable’ only changes the Debian package. To change the backend connection, specify ‘home’ or ‘home-test’ in a subsequent call, e.g. “mycroft-use unstable” followed by “mycroft-use home-test”.
Steve has been building cutting edge yet still highly usable technology for over 25 years, previously leading teams at Autodesk and the Rhythm Engineering. He now leads the development team at Mycroft as a partner and the CTO.