Mycroft AI/voice interface

Curious if people in the ST community have looked at this kickstarter for ‘Mycroft’, which notes ST integration, or at least the plan and feasibility of it. I know Echo, Ubi and others have received a lot of attention, much negative, but what are your thoughts on this approach?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-an-open-source-artificial-intelligence-for/description

Mycroft looks OK. Raspberry pi, ubuntu in a box.

While Ubi and Ivee got a lot of negative press, Amazon echo certainly didn’t. The echo is a fantastic device (our household has two) and with the recent smartthings integration and use of virtual switches, you can do a lot of things with it that the Mycroft kickstarter page claims you can’t.

i’m quadriparetic, and I use a lot of voice technology. The really amazing thing about echo is its farfield recognition. I can use a normal speaking voice with the television on for the next room over and still control the lights. With smartthings and harmony together, I can turn on the television, switch to the Roku, Change thermostat. Not fully granular, but I can do a lot.

There’s just no way that mycroft’s voice recognition will compete across the room. If it does come to market, it will probably end up being like Ubi. It will work fine for some people, but not work for a lot of people.

As a personal thing, I also hate that blinking eye face display. I would find that very distracting.

I did like the intercom feature, where you could direct a voice message to a specific other station.

So I think a year ago we’d have been saying “wow, that looks great in the marketing, we’ll just have to wait to see the actual device to see what it does.”

But now with echo already out there and available to buy, it’s more like "that looks OK in the marketing video, we’ll have to wait to see the actual device to see if it has any features worth reviewing compared to echo and what the microphone quality is like. "

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Thanks, very helpful. And great to hear that the Echo is working so well for you. I passed on the early invite based on some things I had heard, but it sounds like it is working well for you and the ST. The display is a little too much, I agree. I like the concept of renaming it though. I wasn’t clear about ST integration, I would have expected some indication here if that was really happening in any form.

The official smartthings/Amazon echo integration was just announced last week at both smartthings and Amazon. :sunglasses:

We have seen it. We like that it is open. We like that they plan to integrate with SmartThings. We love seeing projects like this come out of the gate promising SmartThings support. We don’t plan on spending a lot of our time on projects like this but we certainly hope the developers come on to these forums and seek out this great community.

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Yeah that’s one of the biggest issues that I see with a lot of these projects… you never know how much of it is going to make it past the design phase, and what the quality would be.

The fact that they’re using a Kevo lock in their video turns me off right away, since I know that there’s no way anybody has even looked at the integration because it doesn’t work right now unless you physically touch the lock. So a lot of it seems like an idea in somebody’s mind put on video, but far from actual implementation.

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