Start-up Mycroft builds open-source digital assistant
Kansas city-based start-up Mycroft has developed an open-source, voice-activated assistant, also called Mycroft, to be run on its Mark 1 table robot. The device, which speaks with a robotic English accent, will find a place in Jaguar Land Rover vehicles after the automaker made a strategic investment in Mycroft. The firm doesn't want to compete with Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, but wants to "democratise the voice assistant" using open-source programming, according to CEO Joshua Montgomery.

Mycroft—whose voice assistant, which runs on Mark 1, is also called Mycroft—isn’t trying to rival any of these big companies’ digital helpers, says CEO Joshua Montgomery. Rather, he says, the idea is to democratize the voice assistant—making it available and adaptable for everyone from kids working on school projects to companies that want to use open-source voice-enabled technology for a call center. While Mycroft will be free to individual users like consumers and developers, who can download it to run on things like computers and other devices, the company plans to charge enterprise users.

Mark 1’s LED face has a friendly look.

Mark 1, which is for sale online for $180, is a physical manifestation of what that can look like.

“We decided to give it a face and to make it cute and personable so people would use it,” Montgomery says.

So far, there are about 90 skills users can activate for Mycroft; the company came up with about 16 of them and developers contributed the rest. They include things like setting reminders, playing music, making Facebook posts, and controlling lights and other connected devices at home. The device comes with some skills already installed, Montgomery says, and users can then add more.

Montgomery showed off some of Mark 1’s capabilities for me, alerting it by saying “Hey, Mycroft”—to which a wavy LED line showed up on its face, as a sort of mouth—and then asking it a range of questions like “Who won the 1959 World Series?” and “How’s the weather in San Francisco?”

Most of the time, it answered correctly, using sources like Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha to gather information. It was a little sluggish to respond, though, and it didn’t always do as it was told. The company tries to make it clear that it’s still a work in progress, and a more consumer-friendly version of Mycroft with greater capabilities is slated for next February. It can be set to use one of several different speech-to-text systems, including that of Google or IBM—and Mycroft is building its own open-source version, called OpenSTT.

The company hopes Mycroft will fit in outside of the home, too. Car maker Jaguar Land Rover made a strategic investment in the company and plans to get its technology into vehicles within several years, Montgomery says.

Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst covering consumer technology for tech market researcher Creative Strategies, thinks bringing Mycroft to the car or using it to imbue various home gadgets with voice interactions could be a good tactic, rather than trying to compete with much bigger players in the digital-assistant realm.