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What’s New — 03/01/2017

By March 1, 2017 No Comments
What's new

This week we give Mycroft Skill developers some new tools as we start a series of changes to make their lives easier, letting them focus on doing their magic and honing the Skills they want to build!

This week’s changes

 

mycroft.ai website

  • Changed the dedicated Mark 1 page to Get Mycroft.  This single page contains info on all the ways you can start interacting with Mycroft — by ordering a Mark 1, downloading the Picroft image, installing the KDE desktop plasmoid, or pulling down code directly from Github and building it yourself.

Picroft 0.8c  

  • A refreshed release of the Raspberry Pi image with mycroft-core 0.8.6 pre-installed.  This makes the initial interaction easier (especially registering).  There is no need to re-install if you already have Picroft working, the daily update mechanism will take care of you automatically.

mycroft-core 0.8.6 

  • Reduced the longest listening time from 30 seconds to 10 seconds.  This helps in noisy situations where silence detection is not possible.  PR #529
  • Skill auto-reload.  The Skill system now monitors the skill folders, reloading them automatically when files have changed.   PR #524
  • Enhanced CLI.  The Command Line Interface (CLI) tool has been totally revamped.   PR #536
    • It now operates as a full-screen app (using curses)
    • Utterances are typed in at the bottom.  A history of utterances and responses is displayed immediately above.
    • Filtered versions of the mycroft-voice.log and mycroft-skills.log files are shown in real-time at the top. By default, the viseme commands are filtered.  Ctrl+PgUp / PgDn scrolls through the logs.
    • Invoke using cli under Picroft or ./start.sh cli –quiet for a Github checkout.
    • To get previous behavior (non-curses), invoke with the “–simple” parameter.
      For example: ./start.sh cli –quiet –simple
    • More to come!
  • As a one-step method for developers, running  ./mycroft.sh start -d starts mycroft-core services and jumps directly into the cli for debugging/debugging.  Use ./mycroft.sh stop after you exit the cli if you don’t want Mycroft to continue running in the background. PR #522

 

I’ve been enjoying debugging in KDE with a Skill in a text editor, the CLI running in a window next to it.  I write a little code, hit Save, then can almost instantly see the Skill auto-reload in the logs.  If I have a typo, I notice and fix that immediately.  Then I use the CLI to test whatever I implemented.  Dropping logger.debug(“”) in my code is a fast way to figure out anything going wrong, and is now easy to see.  A much nicer and faster development experience!