[Productivity] Dictionary to get Meaning and Pronounciation of a word

Skill name: something-meaningful-skill

User story:

I want dictionary to be added as a Skill, so that I can get meaning of any word easily.

What third party services, data sets or platforms will the Skill interact with? https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary
http://gcide.gnu.org.ua

Are there similar Mycroft Skills already? No.

What will the user Speak to trigger the Skill?
Define {Word}
What is the “Word of the Day”?

What phrases will Mycroft Speak?
{Word} means {Meaning of the Word}"
Word of the Day is {Word} and it means {Meaning of the Word}

What Skill Settings will this Skill need to store?

Other comments?

Put any other comments you think are relevant in here

If it helps any, reading through https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2770547/how-to-retrieve-wiktionary-word-content seems to show a few different ways of accessing wictionary data in different formats via the api, some of those might make definitions easier to parse? Also looks like it should be possible for people who want to use it locally to download a full dump of wiktionary definitions, so perhaps offer a config option to use a local dump instead of the online API?

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there are lots of cool python package for this, ive done this inside my lilacs project, i can make it into a skill sooner or later if no one tackles it

This sounds really useful. I think it would be really nice to include “synonyms” and “antonyms” intents. E.g.,
“Hey Mycroft, what are some synonyms for the word ‘happy’?”
“Some synonyms for ‘happy’ are: glad, ecstatic, joyful, pleased…”

Beware of relying upon dictionaries that are significantly old, though. It is sometimes surprising how much common usage of a natural language can evolve in a century.

Awesome, @Jarbas_Ai! We can help Mycroft be “More” than what it originally was!

Yes, @jrwarwick. We can add tons of feature. Who knows, one day it would be able to auto identify the language of the “Word” and translate in our native one :smile:

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/download/ (updated version of the webster’s)
and
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29765 (1913 webster’s) could be usable as offline sources.

@baconator Can you confirm, if any requirement (like need for license) would need to be fulfilled, before we can use it?

@Rishikesh Did a little looking at the licenses on those. WordNet has this license. 1913 Webster’s is out of copyright, but is also very old. While I was at it, I found this relating to using downloads of Wiktionary. (CC-BY-SA looks to be the relevant option of the ones they give?)

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This seems highly practical and useful, and perhaps simple to implement the basic functionality. I’ve added it to our community development list, which I’ll share publicly soon. :slight_smile: