Mycroft AI

» see mycroft.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Mycroft was the voice assistant you were allowed to take apart. It ran on a Raspberry Pi or a desktop Linux box, and on a small round speaker the company made itself if you bought one. The wake word was "Hey Mycroft" and skills were Python packages anyone could write. Everything underneath was swappable, so you could point the speech recognition at a cloud service or run it on the machine in front of you and never send a syllable anywhere. Named after Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother, which tells you the audience it was written for.

I work on edge AI now, computer vision on things that fly, and the argument Mycroft was having is the same argument my own field has been having for a decade: whether the model belongs near the sensor or in somebody else's data center. Mycroft picked near the sensor in 2015, years before that was a normal position to hold about speech, and tried to sell it as a product rather than a research paper. I never ran one. I recognize the problem it chose.

The company was small in a way that is hard to convey against what it was competing with. Amazon and Google were spending at a scale where Alexa and Assistant were loss leaders for an entire retail strategy. Mycroft had a Kickstarter, an accelerator place in 500 Startups' twentieth batch in February 2017, and at the end, four employees.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the hardware ~

Mark I was funded on Kickstarter in 2015 and started shipping in April 2016, a small speaker with a tiny display showing two cartoon eyes. Mark II was the ambitious one: a second Kickstarter that closed in February 2018 at nearly eight times its original goal, with a proper screen and better microphones.

It began shipping at the end of 2022, more than four years late. Hardware is hard, a contract manufacturer is harder, and the pandemic supply chain made both considerably worse. By the time units were going out the door the money to finish the run was gone.

~ the lawsuit ~

In 2020 Voice Tech Corporation sued Mycroft AI over two patents covering the use of voice commands from a mobile device to reach into and control a computer. Voice Tech made no products. It eventually dropped the litigation, which is the detail that makes this file worth keeping, because dropping a case does not refund it.

The defense cost around a million dollars. By late 2022 most of the staff had been laid off, and when Joshua Montgomery wrote the final update there were four people left in the company and one of them was the attorney. His opening line was "I have some unfortunate news to share and there's no easy way to say it, so here it is. We will not be able to fulfill any remaining Mark II rewards."

~ what it left running ~

The software did not die with the company, which is the one advantage of having been open from the start. The code was forked and carried forward by the community as OpenVoiceOS, with Neon AI building on the same base, and both are still developing.

The brand went, though, and the redirect is the tombstone. Type mycroft.ai today and you get a 301 to community.openconversational.ai, a live forum full of people working on exactly what Mycroft was working on, under a name chosen so that no single company owns it. That is a reasonable outcome for a codebase and a complete loss for every backer still holding a receipt for a speaker.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »