oojoshua

By default we keep people's data private. To improve our machine learning models we only use data from people who explicitly opt-in, this represents about 15% of our customers.

We've also developed a way for people to be forgotten if they choose to opt-out later. Data from people who opt out later on is removed from the data set. Users of the data are required to re-fresh it every 30 days so within a month of opting out the data is gone.

15% is actually quite a lot of data and has helped us improve the models significantly. The reality is that if open source is going to remain relevant in the future we need to develop and implement models like the Mycroft model to allow the community to build competitive technology. We think we've done a good job balancing privacy with machine learning, but remain open to suggestions about how we can improve it.

Excellent question. We wrote a whole blog post about it: https://mycroft.ai/blog/why-name-it-mycroft/

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Yes, though it may require you to run a server instance on another computer in your home. We may also ship a speech to text model that you train yourself or that is trained on a much smaller subset of your language.

This is coming, but probably not in 2019. Look for it in 2020 at the earliest.

We have a nice blog post on this where we benchmarked our stack against both of them ( https://mycroft.ai/blog/the-mycroft-benchmark/ ) the answer was - we were tested and found wanting. This was great! This was our first benchmark and gives us a baseline to compare against. The team is now working to improve our performance and bring it up to par.

Our first production version will be released in February 2019. At that time I expect you'll see similar performance across the top 10 skills. We're certainly working hard to make that happen.

We are public! ( https://startengine.com/mycroft-ai ) or at lease non-accredited investors can participate.

We are in the same category as the other solutions, but with a different focus. They are building intelligent assistants, we are building a AI agent. It seems pedantic, I know, but having a larger goal does make us a different beast. I think Google Assistant is the technology that has a similar goal to our own.

We're differentiated by our focus on privacy and our willingness to move the Mycroft back-end into our customer's security perimeter or cloud. This allows them to customize it, change it and make it their own. It remains to be seen if this is a good strategy. I think we'll know a lot more by the end of 2019.