The summary is the last session of the conference; 10D, "Towards the open and free virtual assistant in Catalan: How can we localize Mycroft?"
This session was dedicated to developers, led by our colleague Casimiro Ferreira (jarbasAI). As a developer of the Mycroft community, he told us all the details of the location and development of Mycroft. As he is Portuguese, the session was held in English.
We talked about the basics of Mycroft’s architecture, the development needed to locate it, and the development of new skills.
As the participants had questions to Casimiro, the technical issues we discussed are:
- The ability to serve / deploy Mycroft remotely, and only communicate commands from the device. Casimiro has taught that this is a possibility through his Hivemind project. This has the potential to help with the deployment and installation of Mycroft that we discussed in the 8D session.
- The Plasma Bigscreen project, which uses Mycroft installed on a Raspberry Pi 4 along with KDE Linux, converts any TV to a smart TV. It was commented that by locating Mycroft in Catalan we are effectively locating other Mycfort-based projects such as Plasma Bigscreen.
- It was discussed whether the Raspberry Pi hardware is the best platform for free software smart products, referring to the topic that came up in the 8D session. Not to solve it completely, but to facilitate the installation, Casimiro proposed to ask OpenVoiceOS to make an image of Mycroft in Catalan. In fact, a "pull request" is already made.
- Finally a very important issue for the community, was the management of repositories and resources. All Mycroft development should be done on Mycroft channels and repositories, that's for sure. But as a community we sometimes go faster than Mycroft the company, and we look forward to their decisions (in the case of organizing skills-deficient languages) and their confirmation of pull requests. We also have more resources such as speech recognition and speech synthesis models, which are pieces by Mycroft, but are not part of the code. One proposal would be to create a team on github to start collaborating there. For now, the decision is to avoid it in the best way possible, start a conversation in Mycroft chat and see if we can move forward through Mycroft channels. If not, maybe we can even consider making forks from Mycroft repositories, and keep working there.
As always you can download the contents, slides here and see the recording below