malevolo

AFAIK, they have a checkbox on your settings page where you can opt-in in donate your voice. So every time you say "hey, mycroft" it sends and records the next few seconds. If you didn't opted-in, the voice is discarded just after it's converted to text.

They also collect your IP address to send back the information to your mycroft. I think they save no logs of that either. There are, but, some information they retain, like your city, to query your default city on the weather-skill. I'm pretty sure you can leave all this personal information in blank, and configure it in your local JSON file, but that's not so user friendly. There are many skills which needs some personal information from you (spotify account, google account, etc) to interact with those services. Many of them can be also configured through the JSON file as well, because Mycroft community members are pretty concerned about putting any data on mycroft.ai site at all.

Another concerned by the language theme.

Open source software always had a great support for all languages... even better than closed sourced solutions. The open source voice assistant must be excel on it as well. So, as translate for example libreoffice is quite trivial, how do you plan people to help to translate "natural voices" and "natural expressions"?

I mean, skill developers hardcode their sentences into de the vocab and dialog files, but they don't follow (because there aren't) any good practice like parametrize the verb, the nouns, the adjectives, and so on, so community members can translate into their languages with a bit more context, for example, they should put something like "verb['ruin'] or noun['ruin']" and translators would have pretty quite easy to translate each word.

Genres and number are a problem in a lot of languages, and if the assistant must speak "naturally" it needs to know somehow if it speaking with a man or a woman to answer back correctly, or if I ask a question regarding a woman, Mycroft should be aware of her genre and finish the words accordingly (you must finish the word with a vowel, being "a" female and "o" male, leaving aside all the exceptions, of course)

Bilingualism is even on your radar? It would be *awesome* mycroft could understand at least a pair of languages and let people speak both of them and answer them in the corresponding one. In countries with two or more official languages, peoples usually tends to mix both languages in the same phrase, so if Mycroft could extract the context on a mixed phrase, I think it would be a killing feature no other assistant have (and hardly have never).

I know there are new tools for people to contribute (Persona, Rceording Studio) , not yet launched. Any ETA? They will be multi-language from the start? I know Mycroft multi language support is not yet ready, but contributions in all languages can be stored, because the data can be contributed from even before the support.

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I wrote this just to be constructive. I really think as you voice assistants and AI are just near the corner and as open source evangelist and privacy concerned person, I believe in your project since day 0.

I will spread your hiring offers to my colleagues. I would apply myself if I were more than just a linux sysadmin :P

Yes, it can be achived quite easily.

https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-precise/wiki/Training-your-own-wake-word#how-to-train-your-own-wake-word

Hi Steve!

I guess when Natural Language Processing techniques will be applied, all those problems will vanish, didn't they?

As for bilingualism, just having it in the radar makes me happy. It would be great, but, let people select any pair of languages. Think for example on someone from... China, living in Denmark, or even the children of that person who most probably use danish as mother tongue and chinese as other mother tongue. Or many if not most of european/middle east people who speaks more than one language and none of them is english.

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