
Almond – The Open Virtual Assistant - Jerry2
https://almond.stanford.edu/
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ohthehugemanate
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.

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throwaway2016a
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](https://almond.stanford.edu/get-
almond)

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voltagex_
from [https://github.com/Stanford-Mobisocial-IoT-Lab/almond-
cloud](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."](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?

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voiper1
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...

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

[https://mycroft.ai](https://mycroft.ai)

~~~
gmueckl
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.

~~~
cosmojg
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.

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the_duke
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.

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

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ArtWomb
Very cool. Cron jobs IRL ;)

