The Making of OpenVoiceOS: A Journey Through the Open-Source Voice Assistant Community
In the early days of voice assistants, a Kickstarter campaign was launched for a project called MycroftAI. In February 2016, the company released its first text-to-speech (TTS) engine, Mimic TTS. Despite the promising start, MycroftAI's open-source repositories, mycroft-core, were not widely adopted due to their complex licensing under the GPL.
Enter @JarbasAI, who in April 2017 forked mycroft-core as jarbas-core and became a contributor to the mycroft-core project. However, by October of the same year, mycroft-core was relicensed under the Apache 2.0 license. In December 2017, @JarbasAI abandoned jarbas-core and started a new project, personal-backend, which was a reverse-engineered version of MycroftAI's backend. Personal-backend was designed to be simple and permissively licensed under Apache 2.0, which made it more accessible to other projects.
In January 2018, MycroftAI launched a Kickstarter campaign for its new product, MycroftAI Mark 2, and the personal-backend project was added to their roadmap. Around the same time, another fork of mycroft-core was created by NeonAI called neon-core. The MycroftAI backend was open-sourced under the AGPL license in October 2019, but this did not lead to wider adoption due to the complexity of the AGPL license.
In March 2020, Michael Lewis became the CEO of MycroftAI, and the company started neglecting community contributions. At the same time, @JarbasAI and @AIX partnered up to create a VOIP skill and, along with @j1nx, formed the OpenVoiceOS community project. Chatterbox, another voice assistant project, also forked mycroft-core as mycroft-lib and released a closed-source product.
By January 2021, OpenVoiceOS adopted the personal-backend project, and in April 2021, the project adopted mycroft-lib, which was later renamed to HolmesIV. Chatterbox forked lingua-franca as lingua-nostra, but both HolmesIV and lingua-nostra were eventually abandoned. OpenVoiceOS then forked HolmesIV as ovos-core, and in October 2021, NeonAI adopted ovos-core.
In January 2022, OpenVoiceOS forked lingua-franca, and by May 2022, the founders of MycroftAI had resigned. In November 2022, MycroftAI went bankrupt and partnered with NeonAI to maintain mycroft-core.
Throughout the years, the voice assistant community has been marked by a series of forks and projects that have come and gone. But the creation of OpenVoiceOS was made possible by the simple and permissively licensed personal-backend project, which allowed new projects to run independently of MycroftAI servers. The project serves as a testament to the power of open-source software and the importance of accessible, user-friendly technology.