"The Making of OpenVoiceOS: A Journey Through the Voice Assistant Community"
Voice assistants have become a staple in our daily lives, and OpenVoiceOS has established itself as a major player in this industry. But the journey of OpenVoiceOS has been a long and winding road, full of twists, turns, and forks in the road. Here, we’ll take a look at the timeline of events that led to the creation of OpenVoiceOS, and the journey of the various players in this space.
Aug 2015 – The beginning The journey of OpenVoiceOS starts with MycroftAI, a startup that launched its first voice assistant product through a successful Kickstarter campaign. The company released its first TTS (Text-to-Speech) engine, Mimic TTS, in February 2016, and soon after made its core repositories public under the GPL (General Public License).
Sep 2017 – The Launch of Mycroft Mark 1 MycroftAI’s first product, the Mycroft Mark 1, was launched in September 2017. This was the first device that incorporated the MycroftAI technology, and it was the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Apr 2018 – The Forking of mycroft-core JarbasAI, a MycroftAI contributor, forked the mycroft-core repository and created jarbas-core in April 2018. JarbasAI became a contributor to the MycroftAI project and integrated the TTS engine Tacotron into jarbas-core.
Jan 2018 – The release of personal-backend JarbasAI also reverse-engineered the MycroftAI backend and created personal-backend, which was initially released in January 2018. This was later adopted by MycroftAI and added to their roadmap.
Apr 2019 – The Creation of lingua-franca JarbasAI created the lingua-franca project under the MycroftAI organization, and became a maintainer of the project. JarbasAI also partnered with NeonAI to maintain neon-core.
Oct 2019 – The Open Sourcing of the MycroftAI Backend In October 2019, the official MycroftAI backend was open-sourced and licensed under the AGPL (Affero General Public License). This was a significant moment in the journey of OpenVoiceOS as it paved the way for further development and collaboration in the community.
Dec 2019 – The Launch of Chatterbox @JarbasAI launched the Chatterbox Kickstarter campaign, which was fulfilled in December of the same year. Chatterbox was the first product built on top of the open-sourced MycroftAI backend.
Mar 2020 – MycroftAI abandons personal-backend MycroftAI abandoned the personal-backend project in March 2020, which led to the formation of the OpenVoiceOS community project around mycroft-core.
??? 2020 – The Formation of OpenVoiceOS @JarbasAI, @AIX, and @j1nx formed the OpenVoiceOS community project around mycroft-core, with the aim of creating a fully open-source voice assistant. Chatterbox recreated itself on top of mycroft-lib, instead of a mycroft-core fork, and neon-core was recreated on top of mycroft-lib as well.
Oct 2020 – The Renaming of MycroftOS Due to trademark issues, MycroftOS was renamed to OpenVoiceOS - Mycroft Edition. mycroft-lib was renamed to HolmesIV to avoid trademark issues.
Jan 2021 – The Adoption of personal-backend OpenVoiceOS adopted the personal-backend project, with the original repo unarchived and