Competition: New Amazon Echos Announced Today

I have learned today that Amazon have released press releases on 2 new variants of the Amazon Echo that are coming very soon.

I feel MyCroft will be successful because it offers something Echo does not, an open platform. With something like this, there are applications or things that users will come up with that the designers never even dreamed of.

Granted that Amazon is the larger company and can throw millions of dollars into promoting their device. I still say the open platform aspect alone makes MyCroft the better choice. This forum with people discussing ideas is a clear example of that.

What do you all think?

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Yeah, that was an interesting move by Amazon today. Fortunately, we still get to be the open platform in the space, and not some kind of funnel into Amazon’s closed ecosystem. We get to be the Switzerland of personal assistants. A neutral party vs the Siris, Cortanas, and Echos of the world.

We are looking at how to enable other devices in the space (think Bose or JBL speakers) to adopt our technology and add voice control to their products as well.

What do you guys think? Where else should we be looking to integrate Mycroft?

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Yes, Amazon Echo is a cool device. I think it’s because of it that I’m here =)

Being able to send sound output to bluetooth speaker is a cool feature. And since RPI3 has bluetooth … :smiley:
By the way, Amazon Echo is only available in english AND in America.

Competition is good, and there is a lot to be inspired.

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Speaking of things to integrate into the Mycroft project, my first suggestion would be home-assistant.
It’s an open source python based home automation system that could possibly be used as a back end or similar for Mycroft when it comes to home automation.
It has very low resource requirements and I’m using it on a gen 1 raspbeerry pi B with plenty to spare.

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OCF: http://openconnectivity.org/
Genivi: http://www.genivi.org/

How is Home-Assistant? I recently tried installing it on a windows machine with no avail.

Note even only in America, but only inside the US borders. It does work on other places if you fake the Zip code, but, it’ll never get the weather nor the time right.

I’m sorry hear your having problems with it.
Would you care to elaborate so that you can get some help getting it running? :slight_smile:

I am looking forward to getting Mycroft and starting to integrate it into a number of projects.

Something else to consider is cyber security. It was recently annouced that Amazon recently started undoing all of the encryption for their tablets. I can’t find any indication on whether Echo and it’s variants are secure or not.

I have not done much research on MyCroft but since it is open source adding encryption, etc. is possible.

Larry

Yes, Mycroft’s distinguishing feature from the other virtual assistants will be freedom, but to succeed in this market it will need to be more than just that. It will have to compete on its feature set compared to those other offerings as well. Its openness will certainly facilitate that but the finished Mycroft product will need to be as good or better than the competition, freedom or no.
EB

After some personnal development and some speech recognition test, I think Mycroft will only succeed if has

  • GREAT (effective and fast) speech recognition
  • Excellent hotword detection
  • Good echo cancelation (if MyCroft understand only if silence is there, it won’t be useful)

All the software and opensource goodness in the world won’t help if it’s not good in those areas.

Else, the magic won’t work and it will be just frustration.
It really is a challenge because those are hard topics.

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Hey @Crieloue_Gilles at this moment we have:

  • Effective and fast speech recognition
  • Excellent hotword detection

We are developing a strategy around solving echo cancellation. It is a hard problem. I understand that WebRTC has solved this with the Google AEC that is a part of the project. If someone is interested in implementing that into the project (or some other implementation that solves the problem). I would love to talk to them.

What about Mycroft “Start my Smart electric car and tell me what the current charge level is”

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New Tesla out, I’d love to see if we could make Mycroft communicate with it.

Yeah that would be cool ! picture sitting in traffic having a conversation with mycroft, to pass the time assuming there isn’t another human in the cat that is lol. or playing an interactive game wiith Mycroft to pass the time while siting in your self driving car …oh the future is looking bright! and entertaining

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Merely communicate with it? It could probably run on it!

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i would like to see the ability to have a Ubuntu server daemon that i could install at home on a spare desktop server, that can have all or most of the functionality of the cloud version. with the ability to install my own private knowledge base from wikipedia, ConceptNet 5 (Commonsence database), FreeDB, and various others. something that would be cool is to have a webpage front-end for managing the service on a headless ubuntu server. that way, a person could go to the web console, and upload iso or zip file images of the databases to integrate into it knowledge base. also, in the future, it would be cool to have a Neural net / brain / personality creator for MyCroft. possibly through the use of the old fashioned AIML chatbot scripts, people could customize some of the dialog responses of MyCroft. in the project i did for my ButlerBot, i have a PyAIML interpreter that i modified and integrated with the the project. i was originally planning to create it to where you could do stuff like point the bot at a star or celebrities facebook / twitter page, and have it import it to a AIML script, so that way i could learn and develop that persons responses to questions and dialogue. i had a function already programmed into Butlerbot, which creates a “Brain” file of the bot, programmed from the customized AIML scripts, and also created a log of conversations, which it would learn over long periods of time. it was kind of buggy though, and never had time to work it out. then it would be cool to create a web space to share, trade, or sell really advanced and customized brains of the AI. i know that “skills” also take over a majority of the functions of the AI. but this would be more of a customized personality of the AI.