Obligatory newbie q's before I pull the trigger

So it was nice meeting you folks at maker faire this weekend, and it looks like an exciting project. But I wanted to ask you about a few things I’ve been thinking about before I go ahead & put my money down. I’ve been poking around the site and forums, and don’t see anything covering these, so:

  1. Is there a chance of using a computer or other mobile devices a sort of “terminal” to Mycroft? Letting me send commands to it and get back the answer? Nothing too fancy, just enough so I can have Mycroft in room A and still toss it a question while I’m working on my PC in room B. This would be especially useful if I could access Mycroft from outside the house.

  2. Come to that, what mobile devices are you looking at supporting? I assume Android is a given, but I did the Android thing once, and didn’t like it one bit. So an IOS client would be most welcome.

  3. I have all my media files on a shared server on the network. Is there/will there be a way to get Mycroft to play music off the server? Not even necessary DLNA, just via going into the shared directory would be fine.

  4. How hard would it be to change the “name” Mycroft responds to?If I wanted to address him as, say, Willikins.

  5. Just what am I looking at here as far as creating skills is concerned? I’ve been programming most of my life, but don’t really do any *nux stuff. I just found the adapt site and tutorials, is that what I need to be studying? Is there other documentation out there?

  6. Integration w/Google tools, e.g., having it put an appointment on Google Calendar for me? I expect if this won’t be out of the box, it should be a relatively easy thing to code up, knock wood?

Sorry for the questions, but I spend a lot of time trying to work out how tech can be used in different ways, so there will probably be more :).

Hello Kelly, glad to have you here!

  1. Yes, we have a command line client for Mycroft - run ./start.sh cli to access it. You should be able to ask Mycroft questions from anywhere, as long as you can access the computer that he’s on - something like SSH works fine, for example.

  2. We have community members working on a basic Android app right now. I’m not entirely sure about an iOS app though.

  3. One of our community members has a third party mopidy skill that should be able to help you with that.

  4. Somewhat easy, as long as you’re comfortable modifying source files. Yes. You can currently change the wake word to anything you’d like by changing "hey mycroft" in the bottom of mycroft/client/speech/listener.py to whatever you’d like after adding the pronunciation of this new wake word to mycroft/client/speech/model/en-us/mycroft-en-us.dict.
    After changing this you might notice the unit responds either too much or not enough. To change this, alter the 1e-90 number next to the wake word. For reference, 1e-100 would make the unit more sensitive to the wake word whereas 1e-80 would make it harder to trigger. (credit to Matthew Scholefield)

  5. All of the mycroft-core codebase is written in Python, which is fairly simple to learn. We have docs for creating a skill here, and there are several great Python tutorials out there if you don’t know it.

  6. We’ve had some discussion about integration with Google Calendar, and there is an issue up for it on Github. The current trouble with integrating it is that it requires using Google’s OAuth services, which will require some work from us on the backend. You might be able to relatively easily make a local solution, though.

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OK, cool. Thanks for the comprehensive answers. So I already have my Pi available from outside the house, sounds like I could just ssh in to that and query to it? Very nice. If I’m gaming on my Windows box, though, would I be able to, I dunno, use cygwin to do the same thing, or am I better just SSH’ing with that, too?

Other than that, looks pretty straightforward. The mopidy-based skill sounds like what I’m after for sure, and the docs are very good by the looks of them. I wish I was an iOS dev so I could roll up my sleeves on a client for ya, but if you need a windows thing, I may be able to help. In any case, it looks pretty darned good.

Anyway, yeah, very cool. Thanks again!