Mycroft Picroft

After our trip back to the UK and finding Amazon Echo’s and Google Home devices ubiquitous my wife felt a need to have one, and darling that I am I bought her an Amazon Echo for her birthday… it has been bugging me ever since. I’ve set up a Pi-Hole on our home network to prevent most adverts being shown… but I still know it’s listening :p

So I was really stoked today to find out about the open source AI speaker system the mycroft:

• AI For Everyone
  • Mycroft is the world’s first open source voice assistant.
  • Our software runs on many platforms—on desktop, our Mycroft Mark 1, or on a Raspberry Pi. This is open source software which can be freely remixed, extended, and improved. Mycroft may be used in anything from a science project to an enterprise software application.
• AI FOR EVERYONE
  • Mycroft is the world’s first open source voice assistant. It can run anywhere – on a desktop computer, inside an automobile, it even runs on a Raspberry Pi. It is open so it can be remixed, extended, improved. It can be used in anything from a science project to an enterprise software application.
• What Can Mycroft do?
  • I can help you get stuff done, seamlessly, without looking for the right button to push. Just use your voice to tell me how I can assist you.
• List of skills here
  • https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-skills
• Why open source?
  • We believe the future of AI should be open, not a cryptic black box only few understand and have control over.
  • Building this new technology together, collaborating, sharing ideas and building on top of each other – that’s how we see it.

The Mycroft i has been available for a couple of years, although I was sad to find it has sold out

The Mycroft ii is the more sophisticated next gen piece of kit, although it’s not available yet… but you can reserve your copy for a $1 deposit

So the bad news is that these 2 pre-made options are off the table, the great news is that there’s a Raspberry Pi version that you can hack together yourself

• Picroft is a ready-made way to run Mycroft on a Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 3B+ and is provided as a disk image that you can burn to a Micro SD card.

So now I’m gathering the components to put a Picroft together, PlayStation Eye has been ordered, and I’m installing the software ready to play.

If I can sell the benefits to my wife I might be able to get her to give away the intrusive Amazon Dot, if not I’ve a base to build a homemade AI bot 🙂