Recently I’ve been interested in various AIs and virtual assistants. This is partially because of working on the Magic Mirror project as Women in Computing at RIT’s Projects Committee Head. At one point we were looking at various open source voice assistant/AIs to use. One of the main assistants we were looking at was Mycroft. Mycroft is an open source AI licensed under Apache 2.0 and it is available on GitHub. Mycroft is available on several platforms including their device the Mycroft Mark I, with their next version the Mark II currently in crowd funding and slated to be out December 2018. These devices serve as a direct competitor to proprietary assistants like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa. Mycroft is not only an open source alternative to these devices but also serves as a platform that is much more privacy conscious. The best part about Mycroft is that is can be downloaded to run on a Raspberry Pi 3 so people can customize their hardware setup easily. Someone can get a better speaker or microphone for their setup. It can also be installed on most Linux desktop distros, much like having an assistant on other operating systems (I hope to install it on my desktop for fun when I get the time). It is also possible to get it onto Android if you are willing to go through android studio to hack it into an apk runnable.

Mycroft seems to be the most viable open source competitor to proprietary assistants, their successful kickstarter for their Mark I and currently successful campaign for their Mark II proving that. Full disclaimer, I have backed their Mycroft II Indiegogo campaign. They are one of the few open source AIs I’ve seen attempting to make a physical box aimed to eventually be able to be an out of the box experience, designed for those who have little to no technical skills. It’s worth noting that Mycroft is backed up by an actual company that decided to make their code open source. I’m very interested in this project and will continue to follow it as it grows, I encourage you to check it out for yourself.