Mycroft is a free and open-source software

virtual assistant An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. The term " chatbot" is sometimes used to refer to virtua ...

that uses a

natural language user interface Natural-language user interface (LUI or NLUI) is a type of computer human interface where linguistic phenomena such as verbs, phrases and clauses act as UI controls for creating, selecting and modifying data in software applications. In interface d ...

. Its code was formerly

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, but is now under a

permissive license A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, ...

. It is named after a fictional computer from 1966 science fiction novel ''

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ''The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress'' is a 1966 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein about a lunar colony's revolt against absentee rule from Earth. The novel illustrates and discusses libertarian ideals. It is respected for i ...

''.

History

Inspiration for Mycroft came when Ryan Sipes and Joshua Montgomery were visiting a

makerspace A hackerspace (also referred to as a hacklab, hackspace, or makerspace) is a community-operated, often "not for profit" ( 501(c)(3) in the United States), workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, ...

Kansas City, MO Kansas City (abbreviated KC or KCMO) is the largest city in Missouri by population and area. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 508,090 in 2020, making it the 36th most-populous city in the United States. It is the central ...

, where they came across a simple and basic intelligent virtual assistant project. They were interested in the technology, but did not like its inflexibility. Montgomery believes that the burgeoning industry of intelligent personal assistance poses privacy concerns for users and has promised that Mycroft will protect privacy through its open source machine learning platform. Mycroft AI, Inc., has won several awards including the prestigious Techweek's KC Launch competition in 2016. They were part of the Sprint Accelerator 2016 class in Kansas City and joined

500 Startups 500 Global (previously 500 Startups) is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, Californ ...

Batch 20 in February 2017. The company accepted a strategic investment from

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during this same time period. The company had raised more than $2.5 million from institutional investors before they opted to offer shares of the company to the public through StartEngine, an equity crowdfunding platform.

Software

Mycroft voice stack

Mycroft provides

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

for most parts of the voice stack.

Wake Word

Mycroft does Wake Word spotting, also called keyword spotting, through its ''Precise'' Wake Word engine. Prior to Precise becoming the default Wake Word engine, Mycroft employed PocketSphinx. Instead of being based on

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

recognition, Precise uses a trained

recurrent neural network A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neural networks where connections between nodes can create a cycle, allowing output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. This allows it to exhibit temporal dynamic ...

to distinguish between sounds which are, and which aren't Wake Words.

Speech to text

Mycroft is partnering with

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

Common Voice Common Voice is a crowdsourcing project started by Mozilla to create a free database for speech recognition software. The project is supported by volunteers who record sample sentences with a microphone and review recordings of other users. The t ...

Project to leverage their DeepSpeech speech to text software.

Intent parsing

Mycroft uses an intent parser called Adapt to convert natural language into machine-readable data structures. Adapt undertakes intent parsing by matching specific keywords in an order within an utterance. They also have a parser, ''Padatious''. Padatious, in contrast, uses example-based inference to determine intent.

Text to speech

For speech synthesis Mycroft uses Mimic, which is based on the Festival Lite speech synthesis system.

Modular design and interoperability

Mycroft is designed to be modular, so users are able to change its components. For example, espeak can be used instead of Mimic.

Hardware

The Mycroft project is also working on and selling smart speakers that run its software. All of its hardware is open-source, released under the CERN Open Hardware Licence. Its first hardware project was the Mark I, targeted primarily at developers. Its production was partially funded through a Kickstarter campaign, which finished successfully. Units started shipping out in April 2016. Its most recent hardware project is the Mark II, intended for general usage, not just for developers. Unlike the Mark I, the Mark II is equipped with a screen, being able to relay information both visually as well as acoustically. As with the Mark I, the Mark II's production was partially funded through a Kickstarter campaign, which wrapped up in February 2018, hitting almost 8 times its original goal. As of February 2021, the Mark II had not yet begun shipping to crowd-funders, though shipping of the Development Kit was imminent.

Partnerships

Mycroft has undertaken several commercial collaborations. In May 2018, the company partnered with WorkAround, an impact sourcing provider who broker work opportunities for refugees, to undertake bulk machine learning training. In October 2018, Mycroft collaborated with

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and forecasting company, SickWeather, to identify the frequency of coughing on public transport, funded by the City of Kansas City, Missouri.

References

{{Smart speaker Agent-based software Free and open-source software Home automation Internet of things Open-source hardware Smart devices Smart home hubs Smart speakers Virtual assistants