Crowdfunder Launch
Building a world class software company takes time and money. We’ve decided it makes sense for us to top up our cash position in anticipation of shipping the Mark II. We still don’t have a firm date for shipment, but you can see from the demo below that we’re making strong progress.
If you’re interested in learning more, head over to Crowdfunder and take a look.
Mark II Demo
Progress on the Mark II continues. We’ve significantly cut the boot time and the response latency. We’ve also made improvements to Skill handling and expanded the vocabulary of the top eight Skills. Finally, you’ll notice that barge-in is working – customers can interact with the speaker even while it’s playing music.
This video demo doesn’t make use of the screen ( that software is being developed in a different branch ), but all in all we’re happy with the progress we’ve made over the past two months. I’d like to thank everyone on the technical team for the hard work they’ve done.
Hackathon
The team went to Toronto last week for the Royal Bank of Canada’s open source hackathon. This was a 36 hour event where dozens of developers from both inside and outside RBC worked with Mycroft, Rasa and other open source components to build technology that might be useful at the bank.
We had a great time at the event and took home some valuable lessons. As a result, you’re going to see pre-configured Mycroft virtual machines available on our website in the near future. We’re also doing significant work to better integrate the Rasa NLU framework into our stack so developers can more easily create complex and contextually aware conversational dialog flows within their applications.
Corporate Partnership Program
We signed up our first Corporate Partner this past week and are in the final stages of onboarding three additional partners. If you are interested in using voice technology in your business, but don’t want to send your data to Amazon or deal with Google’s constant rule changes, please reach out.
Mycroft’s First Officer, a serial entrepreneur and Air Force Officer, Joshua brings more than 15 years of leadership experience to the Mycroft team. He is a strong supporter of the open ethos, net neutrality and consumer privacy. Joshua lives in Holualoa, Hawaii with his wife and co-founder Kris Adair.