Originally published at: http://mycroft.ai/blog/history-of-mycroft-origin-story/
Many of you have joined us recently and may not know about the origin story of Mycroft. Or, maybe you’ve been with us for years and would appreciate a trivia source. Over the next few weeks, we’ll recap some major moments in developing the open voice assistant, and the ideas behind them.
Last year, we made a fun video with Joshua, Derick, and Kris to talk about why we started Mycroft and what making an open source, open hardware voice assistant is all about. You’ll hear about the early inspiration for open voice control and why the project started with a Kickstarter.
You can see our feature in Popular Science from December 2015. We were in Forbes and CNET even earlier, in August 2015.
Do you know why we named it Mycroft? Early on, Joshua shared about the naming of the company and spoiler: it is not named directly after Sherlock Holmes’ older brother.
There are a few important reasons we got into the voice space, even before it was the fastest adopted technology the world has ever seen. This is Joshua’s take on why voice is important to him.
So how does Mycroft fit into the Artificial Intelligence space, especially with the recent demonstration of Google Duplex?
In these posts, and the ones we’ll talk about over the next few weeks, you’ll notice that some things have changed over the years, but one thing has been steadfast since day one. We felt in 2015, and still do today, that user agency, data privacy, and open source are the most important aspects of the fastest growing technology in the world.
Have any questions about the history of Mycroft or where the project is going? Let us know below.