Almond – The Open Virtual Assistant | Hacker News Reader

Almond – The Open Virtual Assistant

almond.stanford.edu

156 pointsJerry211 comments

This is EXACTLY the way personal digital assistants should work IMO. Use the unixy principal of small, purpose driven tools that can be infinitely chained. Perfect for tool using monkeys, and much better than "the magic assistant who knows what you want before you do" bullshit that everyone else is chasing.

This has huge promise and I'm eager to try it more myself. I think it would make an awesome Slack bot. But the the now button is enlightening.[1]

> Do away with the complex UIs of IFTTT or Zapier

The interfaces on those sites can be complicated because the services they interact with can be complicated.

This was my demo experience with Almond:

> me: post a tweet about cats

> Almond: What caption do you want? [list of boxes of choices]

The choices are: - Use the image id from Thecatapi - Use URL from Thecatapi - Use description - Use the link from Thecatapi - None of the above

To me that is a "complicated UI". If I'm non-technical I have no idea what a URL is. Even as a technical person I don't know how "link" and "url" are different. I have no idea what "Thecatapi" is, why it was chosen to fulfill my request, or what it will tweet about.

I can see how this may be useful for tech people but this strikes me as more of a super high level programming language than an actual assistant.

[1] https://almond.stanford.edu/get-almond

from https://github.com/Stanford-Mobisocial-IoT-Lab/almond-cloud

"NOTE: using the embedded Thingpedia is not recommended. Instead, you should rely on the publicly available instance at https://thingpedia.stanford.edu."

While I'm happier relying on an institution such as Stanford rather than a random company, I'd rather self host everything - doesn't that kinda defeat the point of this?

Looks REALLY COOL, but seems pretty rough around the edges.

I was hoping it would be "easier to set up than ifttt" as well as allowing live commands.

But it seems way too rough to be working properly. But it didn't connect to google contacts, an SMS=> Email integration with gmail failed, I can't get crypto currencies...

I wonder how this compares to the other major open virtual assistant:

https://mycroft.ai

Mycroft is not fully available as source code. Core parts of the functionality are provided only by remote servers run by Mycroft with closed source software.

I cannot tell if Almond is fully OSS.

Huh? Which parts? Last I checked, both the STT software (Mozilla DeepSpeech) and TTS software (Mycroft Mimic) are open source, as are the core and skills.

I didn't know this detail about Mycroft. I suppose it's something you do when you try to run a company.

From Almond's website: > Almond is free software, and is available on Github. You can download, distribute or modify Almond as you see fit.

What layer / library is used for the actual speech recognition part?

I couldn't find it now.

ALSO: commits actually go back to 2016, so it's been worked on for a while.

What are some "can't live without" integrations people generated with Almond or other virtual assistants?

Very cool. Cron jobs IRL ;)

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