Mycroft sound effects, and perceived latency

Looking forward to getting my mycroft unit - pretty sure one of the first things i’ll try is to add the Star Trek computer sound effects :slightly_smiling:

There’s a sound for “acknowledged”, for “working…”, and probably some others. These would be preferable to having Mycroft say things like “Let me search for that for you…” IMO.

Also, given there’s a couple of seconds lag while mycroft does the STT (ie, sends the recording to whatever cloud service), I think a gentle “acknowledged” sound effect would help reduce the perceived latency. The acknowledged sound effect could be triggered after the wake-word, as soon as silence is detected, while the recording is sent to be recognised. I think this would help with the awkward silence between finishing asking it something, and hearing a response.

(just basing this on seeing videos of mycroft alpha versions in action, not got one yet)

EDIT: TNG, obvs :wink:

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Having the Star Trek (TNG) sounds would be great. If you do end up making those changes, please share. And of course, if you need some extra eyes on the code, I’d be thrilled to at least try to help.

Or old-style TOS computer “WORKING” would be cool, too.

@rj2 Yeah, we are working on knocking that latency down (has to do with remote API calls, as you correctly guessed). As you pointed out, there are some interactions that could be put in place in order to make it seem less slow. We really need to work on good natural responses to fill the dead air.

Real people say, “Hmm…” or “Let me look that up for you.” like you said. We just need to throw the logic in to accomplish that. You guys have some great ideas, let’s keep them flowing!

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My plan is for a fully self hosted assistant and this project is the closest that I have found to that.