Helping Mycroft to automate tasks for you

Hi everyone!
We are a team of 6 French engineering students in Data Science and we would like to share our project idea with you and get your opinions.

For now, Machine Learning is mostly used to improve Mycroft’s ability to understand the vocal commands of users. We would like to apply it with another purpose: give Mycroft the ability to understand your habits and to automate tasks for you. To reach this goal, Mycroft should be able to:

  1. Store data about your skills history
  2. Talk to you without prior request

The implementation of this ability would allow scenarios like that to happen:

Suppose that you wake up every weekday at 7am and ask Mycroft to turn on the TV around 7:25am when you take breakfast.
After a few days following this routine, on thursday, Mycroft will talk to you at 7:23am:

“Would you like me to turn on the TV for you in two minutes?”

“Yes, please.”

“Would you like me to do it every friday when I know you are awake from now on?”

“Yes”

What would you think about a feature like that?
Would you allow Mycroft to record your activity to have access to such features? (There would be of course some kind of anonymization of your data)

We are looking forward to get your opinions :slight_smile:

I’m apologize in advance but that I would be annoyed if mycroft will bother me with questions, not that it is bad idea but I would prefer a turn off button for this feature for personal preference.

Thank you for your feedback Alex :smiley:

What if automation suggestions happened in the only two following scenarios:

  • Right after you asked Mycroft to do something
  • When you explicitly ask Mycroft for suggestions

Would it still be something annoying to you then?
We are open to any functional suggestion.

I would like Mycroft to have that feature, provided the following are met:

  • the history of user habits and preferences is kept locally on Mycroft
  • it is an opt-in functionality and Mycroft asks for it once (can be triggered on request afterwards)

If by using machine learning methods to discover habits you mean mining all Mycroft users use patterns and offering new functionalities based on that, you could consider using privacy-preserving data collection technique (if Differential privacy could help here, this kind of assurance should do).

In that case yes it would be awesome. The only thing is if it won’t ask me questions when I don’t need them like when I’m a sleep for example. But yes generally having mycorft turning TV opening gates and setting room temperature values would be a great idea.

Indeed we though about something like that and be sure we will make a point of preserving the privacy of the users.

That’s good to hear :wink:

We are still in the conceptual phase so your feedback is very useful to us, thanks again!