What Is MyCroft? Dec 16th

Listen and follow:

Read the complete topic:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is creating a big impact on how people live and perform business worldwide, from transportation to healthcare, financial services to robotics, manufacturing, and more. It is a broad field of computer science that focuses on creating intelligent computers, machines, and technologies that can accomplish activities that would usually need human intelligence such as visual perception, speech recognition, translation between languages, problem-solving, and decision-making. Smart assistants (also known as virtual assistants) is an example of AI, this includes Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google assistant. In this article, we will highlight MyCroft, another smart assistant that is free and available to everyone.

MyCroft AI is an open-source voice assistant, which means it is free and can be remixed, expanded, and upgraded to meet users’ specific needs. Natural language processing, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text are all combined in MyCroft AI to offer a strong conversational experience. Its platform focuses on turning any gadget into a smart personal assistant that can do a range of tasks by enabling voice control. Making use of cutting-edge technology that allows users to collaborate, share ideas, and help one another optimize app usage.

Smart speakers have been a prominent consumer electronics market and the always-on virtual assistant has been embraced by big businesses such as Apple, Amazon, and Google. Amazon's Echo that works along with Alexa and Google Home with Google Assistant are the two most popular smart speaker manufacturers, followed by lesser companies like Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Apple. They carry out requests, search the web, and control smart devices. This sector is growing dramatically, with market revenues expected to reach 15.6 billion dollars by 2020 and 35.5 billion dollars by 2025 (Vailshery, 2021).

However, our privacy may be compromised as a result of all this technology. According to news reports, these firms have been illegally listening in on conversations. Unless you actively delete the data or turn off the recording capability, the data they collect is frequently saved permanently. Though, they have stated that information is only listened to by a small percentage of their consumers and that the data is anonymized. It is still worrying that this process is not transparent and that the client rarely has complete control over their data.

That is why MyCroft is aimed at preserving privacy. Joshua Montgomery, the founder of MyCroft AI, thinks that the expanding market of intelligent personal assistance raises privacy problems for consumers, and has committed that Mycroft's open-source machine learning platform will protect customers' privacy. Furthermore, he said that he gained a lot of attention from firms in the hospitality industry, such as cruise ships and hotels as protecting guests' privacy is important. 

MyCroft AI isn't as big as Amazon or Google. Their team first created a smart speaker reference device called the Mark I in August 2015 and launched it on Kickstarter (a corporation that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity). Despite their small funds compared to Amazon and Google's billions, they were able to form a community of like-minded people to build an open-source voice assistant, make significant progress on the technology, and increase the team through their fundraising and competition wins.

Several companies have invested in Mycroft. Jaguar’s Land Rover, for example, uses the platform to test in a Jaguar F-Type sports car. Another is Q.bo One, a small personal robot from Spain, and Chatterbox, a talking AI that teaches youngsters to code also uses MyCroft AI platform. Its most recent smart speaker project is the Mark II, intended for general usage, not just for developers. Unlike Mark I, the Mark II is equipped with a screen, being able to relay information both visually as well as acoustically. 

Finally, since it is an open-source platform, we can say that MyCroft AI is community-driven. Thousands of contributors made up of users, developers, and translators work together to improve the core technologies, create new voice skills, translate the experience into new languages, and share data to improve machine learning models.