The pre-release

Slowing the skill setting poll to once every 5 min #1477

This was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at reduce load of the backend.

Refactor event handler argument calling #1458

The logic handling the has been reduced

Bugfixes and cleanups

• Fix accessing non-existent attribute in except blocks (#1476)
• Reduce verbosity when skill settings fetch fails. (#1466)
• Fix local service crash when servers are down (#1459)

v18.2.0b

We are in Beta!

During the last couple of months a lot of work has gone into the Mycroft stack, both by the core team but also by Mycroft's incredible community. We've been chipping away on the various system that were put into place for the 17.08 release and improved the usability for users while making the tools created for skill creators easier to use. The release notes below is just the tip of the iceberg that is our 18.02 release, months of work and a vast number of point releases has led here.

Intent handler decorators rework #1454

Clean up of the intent handler decorators allowing for future improvements such as loading skills in parallel and possibly resolving an issue with skill intent registering on the wrong skill

Improved handling of Settings and Config while not paired #1451

Skill settings and remote config will not be fetched before device is paired

Misc

• Bugfix for settings changed callback after pairing #1452
• Train padatious after all skills have been loaded #1455
• Improve message when triggering skills before they are loaded #1456

18.02 RC2

Audio services startup, #1447

An error when loading the chromecast backend prevented all backends from loading. The backend loading code has been updated to be more tolerant against this kind of errors.

Do not sync NTP on desktop, #1444

Remove NTP sync on desktop installations where this is not needed, This increases boot speed with 15 seconds. We are very grateful to @zachwelch for providing this fix!

Handle repeating events better after hibernate, #1435

The repeating event would start triggering at 2 times per second if it falls behind the current time until it catches up. This occurs for example after hibernation. This is resolved by never allowing the next sceduled time to be in the future. Big thanks to @roadriverrail for noticing and helping find a solution.

Misc

• Simplify version checking (#1450)
• Remove redundant except (SystemExit, KeyboardInterrupt) clauses (#1446)
• Fix platform comment in config (#1448)

18.02 RC1

Adapt intent Bugfixes #1434

• Fix Enable/Disable intents
• Fix Dynamic registration of vocabulary

Precise update #1441

The precise package that's downloaded has changed slightly, to accommodate these changes some mycroft-core code needed to be updated.

Misc

• Documentation improvement in the default mycroft.conf #1439

The valentine release

Lots of love to the community!

This release has no strong focus other than cleaning up some of the rough edges in core (there are still plenty), however lots of community members have stepped up and added more language support and a couple of brave people have started to improve the setup experience on Arch linux.

Language support

• Improve the Italian formating functions (Added nice_time and pronounce_number #1407, Shoutout to @aleale99 for excellent work!
• Update French dialogues and add French formatting and parsing functions #1416, Big thanks to @zecakeh
• Add format and parsing methods for Swedish #1400

Reduce CLI log clutter #1420

Most of the info messages from the skill settings were demoted to debug and the debug messages are filtered by default making it easier to check for errors and info logs from skills in development.

Make keywords per skill to fix overlapping keyword names (#1422, #1428)

To hinder skills from forcing new vocabulary on other skills when naming collisions occur the names are now mangled somewhat before sent to the intent service.

Update developer setup script for Arch linux #1406

Big thanks to @Ceda-EI for the hard work and @femans for testing it.

Event scheduler improvements

• schedule_repeating_event() start time defaults to current time + period #1426
• Non repeating events are automatically cancelled and event handlers are teared down #1364

Miscellaneous

• Upgrade pip version to 9.0.1 #1410
• Fix bug in nice_time() for times before noon #1412
• Audio service: Add message on track start #1367

Skill settings hotfix release

Update to fix issues du to changes in the backend #1401 #1404

Adds sanity checks that both name and value are available before accessing them. This is now done when checking for update of settingsmeta and when attempting to save settings to disk.

Much more miscellaneous!

Language support

Swedish (sv-fi and sv-se) dialogs were added (#1386) and Italian parsing and formating functions were updated (#1389). Big thanks to @Jony0008 and @aleale99 for working on this.

Functions for displaying and speaking time and numbers added #1394

mycroft.util.format.nice_time() can be used to get a string suitable either for speech or text.
mycroft.util.format.pronunce_number() can be used to generate a string that sounds good from a number.

Support for Deepspeech server #1370

Deepspeech released a new model before Christmas and is getting pretty good. Mycroft now has an STT interface connecting to the deepspeech_server, a simple server hosting deep speech. The server can easily be setup locally for a user with decent hardware.

List skills in CLI #1395

The currently loaded skills can now be listed using the new command :skills.

Misc

• Messages at skill shutdown and load failed messages. #1396
• Run requirements.sh before pip install requirements.txt to ensure requirements for the python packages are installed. #1377
• Skill settings changed callback, can be used to apply changes directly when changed on home.mycroft.ai is recieved #1379
• Add match_one function to match a user input to a list item or dictionary key to util.parse #1372

Let's not do the timewarp again

Fix Mark-1 time update issues #1368

An issue with the way the Mark-1 image was identified. Due to a late clock sync the device would fail to pair and require a manual reboot to get into a working state. This is now handled in a much smoother way.

More TTS and STT modules

Watson and Bing TTS was added along with Houndify and Bing STT. Big thanks to @JarbasAl for providing these modules.

Misc

• Fix sphinx documentation #1360
• Better handling of lists when reading from backend #1365
• Limit CLI memory usage #1369

Lucky number 0.9.13

Auto-updating skills can now be disabled #1344

The skill auto-update can now be disabled in the configuration. Thanks @JarbasAI for this contribution

Italian dialogs for core #1331

Translations for the dialogs in core for italian added by @aleale99

utterance_remainder() #1287

Messages to skills now has a method utterance_remainder() returning the utterance with the words matched by keywords removed.

Misc

• Pull Request template added #1326
• Code of conduct document added #1323
• Phonetic translation added to TTS #1287
• Model hash is now included in the wakeword sent (if opted in) #1345

TODO:

Revert "Merge pull request #1305 from MycroftAI/feature/send-platform"

This messes up Pairing so it will be reverted until there is a backend
change to support it

This reverts commit 71611ca6bef98adc5ef6738a92efb22f8afdc4a9, reversing
changes made to c7da63c536ead04d0339991f66f314db38926366.