The last several weeks have been a little crazier than normal in the Mycroft world. I’ll talk about what’s going on then catch you up with changes in the latest release.
Road Trip!
The Mycroft development team has been on a road trip the last few weeks. As of last week, we have all arrived in Portland and are working in the same room for the first time ever! This involved traveling from as far away as Brazil and we think it will be worth it. We will be together for a little over a month, and I expect the relationships we are building will speed up our development even after we return to our homes in May.
This week’s changes
mycroft-core 0.8.8
- New Features
- Added “expect_response” flag when speaking. This is a step towards dialog interaction where no wake-up word will have to be spoken. PR #576
- Audio from text to speech (TTS) is now cached, avoid unnecessary calls to Mimic. PR #599
- Wolfram Alpha skill now only attempts to handle missed intents that look like questions (Who/what/when/etc). PR #601
- Internationalization Support
- Build process
- Bug fixes
- Fixed volume increase/decrease, broken by Skill:Intent namespacing. PR #619
- Commands issued using subprocess.Popen() were remaining open in background. PR #572
- Excessive CPU usage due to testing for wake-up word on every chuck received. PR #578
- Wake-up word was requiring double silence duration at end. PR #586
- The skill installer skill wasn’t catching exit code properly. PR #631
home.mycroft.ai backend
- Implementing automated health-checks, incorporating them into a Nagios infrastructure monitoring system.
- Added “Picroft” as a device type.
- Various minor styling changes
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.