Testing new skills/New skill creation

Archive - Mycroft Project Skills
1

Hey all!

I’ve installed Mycroft on an Ubuntu VM and have been having quite a bit of fun playing with it at work, but I would also like to make him do some of my work for me. For reference, I work with a lot of bioinformatics, so I already have multiple scripts that I run with high regularity and I would like my coworkers to be able to execute easily as well since they have even less computer experience than I do. I’ve been trying to follow the instructions on the documentation (https://docs.mycroft.ai/skill.creation) to create and test a skill and have hit a wall. Since I was using a VM I was trying to simply install the skills sdk and get a “Command ‘python setup.py egg_info’ failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-88n4qem6/mycroft-skills-sdk/” every time. I tried to do it via the virtual environment but I cant get the mycroft-skills-container to work. That may be a pathing issue but I am rather new to this sort of work and have no clue how to fix it.

My end goal is to be able to go “Hey Mycroft, do XYZ” and it will execute those scripts that I have already built for our pipeline. Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks!

2

Hello!

I’m glad that you are having fun!

It sounds to me like you would be able to launch scripts via skills alone, buy matching the intents with functions. If you require a more interface-like two way communication with a running application, you might take a look at some of the core clients. This might be useful in a situation where you have long running tasks and don’t want to block waiting for feedback until your scripts have run, for instance.

I think that we need to do a little bit of updating on the docs site, as the skills SDK is a little stale. There is a more recent tool called skill_container that might be more useful.

./start.sh skill_container /path/to/skill/folder

This utility will act as an isolated skills service, load only the specified skill, and attach to the Mycroft messagebus.

I would encourage you to take a look at some of the community skills here as well! There are plenty of examples for hitting outside APIs and such.

Feel free to join us on slack if you want a faster feedback loop:
http://mycroft-ai-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/

Cheers!

1 Like