plus development of a custom SBC that didn’t work
plus court trial / patent troll
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Blockquote
Speaking of that, tf the company was playing nice, instead of selling the parts that should be part of our pledge (Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 2GB - Mycroft ), then they could send it to the backers.
I have to say, at the time it happened I was completely appalled. I think that action, taken without any communication to the community for months and months and when the company had 4000+ Mark IIs promised to kickstarter backers was just the height of irresponsibility and accountability to the community that has been supporting this effort all along. It wuld have made s much mre sense to figure out a way to use them to fully or partly satisfy their moral obligation to their backers (such as at least send them the Pis).
While I’m happy the communication has finally resumed, I am devastated that Mycroft took the shameful secretive approach they did. It self-contradicts the stated values of the company. Although this is not true for me (and to be fair I was not a kickstarter backer) I can imagine many will not be able to get past these acts of self-contradiction.
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Well.
I think I’ve said my piece now. The CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that they are not sending Kickstarter backers their “rewards”, and they’re shutting down. Wow.
Yes, I know how Kickstarter works. I’ve seen a few of them fail that I’ve invested in. But nothing like this. This was a serious bait and switch. The device in that video NEVER EXISTED. And they claimed it did, for YEARS.
There are alternatives, that I can run on my Pi. I’m sure others will follow too.
The owners of Mycroft.ai though, the CEO, and all of the founders, have put a blight on the face of open source artificial intelligence. It’s disgusting that they’re getting away with it. And I feel bad for employees who got saddled with the task of running interception for the scam and didn’t know it. I get the feeling Gex legit had no idea. On the upside, I’ve started calling things Mycrofty if they sound too riddled in buzzwords. At least I got a new word out of the deal.
So I’m out. Good luck everyone. I gotta call a guy about a bridge, I wonder if it’s still for sale…
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You are entitled to your own opinion, but I think you are leaving out some facts here that prove the opposite of your bold claim.
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One can file a complaint with the FTC as I did.
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Some months ago, the leadership of the project posted the question to this forum, “What do you want to see in the future from the MyCroft project?”
I wanted to post a link to my reply, here, because it seems relevant.
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Please tell me I’m misreading this.
In all the announcements and every time the community explicitly asked Mycroft, the backers have been explicitly reassured that they would receive their units (just after the orders). This is the first time I read any message stating a difference. Personally, I take offense to you stating “as I’ve explained previously” as this was not explained in any of the announcement nor in this new blog post.
Had you said “I’m sorry, we really wanted to but it didn’t work out” I’d have accepted that. It was the risk of backing. But I am actively irked by your statement acting as if Mycroft had separated “orders” and “rewards” like this before because again, this was not the case in any of the official communication.
I understand Mycroft didn’t want Mycroft to die either and this is not what you or anyone else intended, but us backers deserve honest and clear communication, especially at this point. Being told “as I’ve explained previously” on something not in any of the official communication ever (including this latest blog post) is offensive. Please just honestly state that you thought it would still be possible to ship to backers without acting like “rewards” were ever treated differently from “orders” by Mycroft.
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Since clear communication is very important to me, your post had me go back and check that I wasn’t fooling myself into thinking we’d said something we didn’t. We’re both sort-of right, but that means we could definitely have done a better job of communicating it.
In the Dec 21, 2021 Kickstarter update, I said:
In the Kickstarter You pledged your support a long time ago, and we will ship your rewards with every production run until every pledge is honored. At this time, we can’t commit to shipping rewards and perks before orders. But as production increases we will include more as fast as we can.
This implies our position on orders vs. rewards, but doesn’t explicitly state it. We relied on Kickstarter users understanding what that difference means, and so we didn’t make that explicitly clear in that post.
In our Jan 26, 2022 blog post, in response to the questions that arose from that update, we tried to clarify:
Though we’d love to ship crowdfunding perks first, we have to ship both new orders and crowdfunded perks simultaneously to make production work financially.
Again, we draw a distinction, but don’t explicitly define what that is, again relying on Kickstarter users understanding what “reward” means on that platform. I had extensive discussions with the team about the policy before we adopted it, so we all had a very clear idea of “what” and “why” but it seems we could have done better job making that clear to our backers.
But yeah, it didn’t work out, and we’re not able to ship any more rewards or perks to crowdfunding platform supporters. I don’t think anything I say will make anyone happy about that.
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My python coding skills grew as a direct result of the amazing people whom have been a part of this community. I look forwarding to connecting with these people in the future, and will continue to follow the openvoice project as it matures.
Phil (PCWii)
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DOSS audio? We’re working on adding to the music and audio skills of our Neon OS right now, would love to chat if you have time. clary@neon.ai
Maybe I’m jumping the gun here because this information will be included in Update from the CEO: Part 2 or 3 or 4, but what do we know about the future of your other products, such as Mimic3 and the newly announced Grokotron? I’ve been testing out Neon on my MarkII, and it seems nice. It was easy to get going, but as is often the case the documentation is a bit… opaque.
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So, i bought a MarkII in 2018, i will not get it? What a disappointment. Oh, yeah, reading back i am correct.
When I talk about “orders”, I mean specifically actual orders: purchases through the website starting in 2021. Kickstarter “rewards” and Indiegogo “perks” are not “orders”, as I’ve explained previously.
So the people who helped make this project possible can go and do whatever they want to themself and the people who bought afterwards get their stuff. Great.
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Kickstarter: The End of the Campaign
Thank you for trying out Neon, and for the feedback 
Indeed, we’re building out our end-user documentation right now, and contributions as well as feedback are most welcome.
Here are a couple things that might help:
- Our public Google drive folder with Skills Guide & Quick Start Guide (comment privileges enabled, Quick Start guide is written to go with our USB boot drive) Neon AI OS for the Mycroft Mark II - Google Drive
- Help us build out our online documentation here - NeonAI® Documentation by working in this repository GitHub - NeonGeckoCom/neon-docs: Neon Documentation
- Especially if you’re more of a dev user, we have more info on our GitHub and have started using the “discussions” feature as well. Discussions · NeonGeckoCom/NeonCore · GitHub
- Lots of dev questions have been answered in our Matrix chat, which is searchable. We’d like to get those organized into an FAQ. https://matrix.to/#/#NeonMycroft:matrix.org
- Dev questions are also being fielded in the OVos chats here - https://matrix.to/#/#openvoiceos:matrix.org
For anyone reading and wondering, the Neon AI team are whole-hearted participants in collaborative community efforts.
I feel it’s important I tell you directly that any constructive contribution to our documentation will be met with sincere appreciation. If you’re not comfortable working on it directly in GitHub, I would happily insert the contents of a community-created document that you share with me at clary@neon.ai
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So something that doesn’t seem to have been asked. Ok so you cannot ship rewards to backers, fine. It sucks, but fine. But you are processing orders, so you have products to sell. Will you still have products to sell once those orders are complete, and if so, why are you not accepting new orders from your own backers instead ?
Is the product you are now shipping DOA? Are there literally no more you can even sell to enthusiasts ?
For someone trying to be so clear, you really are making things very opaque.
Based on the support comments here, the product barely works, and based on the fact that their “phone home” main server is down, it’s possible they’re all bricked now.
Since anyone can build a better system for the price of a Raspberry Pi, googling, and a few days of work, I’d be shocked if any “enthusiasts” still exist who would pay for it.
This is yet another way for them to duck responsibility to their backers on KickStarter and StartEngine. They will now claim it’s not their fault that people aren’t buying the $500 junk kits, so of course they can’t do things like refund shipping on the invisible sky wizards they promised us.
there’s a ton they COULD do, if this was a legit operation:
- Refund money
- Pledge to refund money
- At least refund expedited shipping charges since they aren’t going to ship anything
- Use any remaining funds to ship the existing products out to backers.
oh but let’s see what they actually do.
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Nothing bricked here.The Mycroft developer team is working on a Dinkum version that does not depend on the server. It is already available on the Beta-Stream (can be configured in your Mark-II device).
As an alternative there are OVOS and NeonAI.
- you could have done this for many years with Picroft, Snips, Rhaspy, etc. So what have you been waiting for so long?
- You clearly didn‘t try that yourself or don‘t care for a good microphone system with beamforming and noise cancellation - which is the key point of the Mark-II - the SJ201 board does a great job here
I understand you are not happy how the Mycroft campaign went. As an Mycroft investor I have lost here some money, too - that is the risk of any investment. But your baseless claims and your uninformed statements are simply boring at this point…
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This shouldn’t be the risk of an investment where we were told EVERY MONTH that they were on the cusp of finishing the product. Where they put out VIDEOS showing the product supposedly working. But the actual code they were posting online was so far removed from what they showed.
And then we find out it was mostly smoke and mirrors. The founders were pocketing way more money than they were claiming, and two of them were using company funds to run their coffee farm in Hawaii.
So here we are at the end of it and we’re told there’s NO MONEY LEFT. None of the original specs are being adhered to. And if I want anything resembling what I paid for, that I paid to have expediting shipping for, I have to buy a $500 broken device that will only live thanks to third parties.
To answer your questions,
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I didn’t wait, I did start putting something together on my own. That’s why I made that point earlier. Not sure how you get “baseless” out of this, since you clearly agree with me.
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I think you misread something. I didn’t have any problems with my mic.
I’m extremely happy with OVOS and NeonAI. I can’t stress enough how awesome it is that a third party is picking up the slack.
But I also feel extreme disgust at how Michael Lewis, who claimed he sold his previous companies for over 100M, can’t find the pocket change to refund shipping costs on a non-existent product.
For every ten companies I’ve started, one will turn a profit, one will break even, and the other eight devour any/every resource thrown to them.
It’s virtually impossible to succeed in a project of any scale without deep deep pockets backing you. That’s just how it is.
Others climbed out onto that branch with you. I know how that feels. Letting them down (that’s how it felt to me) is as bad or worse than personal losses.
I’m genuinely sorry this wasn’t your one in ten, but it’s business, and business isn’t kind unless your family’s connected e.g., FTX.