Brief: If you want a smart speaker cum virtual assistant like Amazon Echo and Google Home that doesn’t spy on you, Mycroft Mark II is what you are looking for. The open source device is open for pre-order via its crowdfunding campaign.
This is the era of virtual home assistants. From setting alarms to get weather information, from playing your favorite music to play Netflix for you, these virtual assistants do it all. You just need to call their name and ask them the questions. You don’t even have to be nice to them, not that it hurts. All you need is a device that uses these virtual assistants.
Big names like Amazon, Google and Apple have their own virtual assistants coupled with their own smart speaker devices. The year 2017 has seen a big jump in the sales of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home. And the trend will continue upward.
As a tech enthusiast, I wanted to buy Echo or Mini to experience this kind of gadget trend. But there is a big problem with these smart devices and that’s privacy.
Problem with popular virtual home assistants: Privacy
Amazon Echo and Google Home listen to you and record everything you say. It was reported that these devices listen to the conversations, even when they are not active.
Moreover, Amazon will soon be using these devices to serve you ads. Imagine asking the device for the weather information and it tells you what kind of umbrella people are buying.
On the other side, Google can never be trusted with your data.
So, what do the privacy aware people like you and me do?
Meet Mycroft: An Open Source Virtual Assistant
Thankfully, we have an open source virtual assistant called Mycroft. It doesn’t violate your privacy, it is open and customizable. You can get the source code of Mycroft on GitHub.
Mycroft also has their own set of smart speakers range called Mark.
They have just launched a new crowdfunding campaign for its upcoming second-generation smart speaker Mark II (read Mark 2). Unlike the previous model, the Mark II is a vertical device and resembles Google Home.
Mark II is technically advanced than its predecessor. While the first version was more focused on developers and DIY enthusiasts, Mark II has been matured to become a consumer-ready product.
Hey Mycroft, What can Mark II do?
Mycroft Mark II is capable of doing 140 kinds of tasks. These tasks are called ‘skills’ in Mycroft term.
You can use it for creating shopping lists, playing music, telling jokes. You can also use it to play internet radio on Pandora and NPR or even YouTube.
It can also be used to control Philips Hue, the smart lighting from Philips.
All you need to do is to say “Hey Mycroft” and your virtual home assistant Mark II will be at your service.
New ‘skills’ are being added by an active developer’s community. You can discover those new ‘skills’ by asking it “what’s new today”. You can, of course, get the updates from Mycroft website.
Not just audio! Mark II has a screen as well
Neither of Amazon Echo and Google Home has a display on it. Mark II clearly has an advantage here with its simple and clear display.
Want to know the time or the weather, it’s simply on the display. This is a good candidate to replace your digital clock or radio.
You can customize the looks of the screen, its display color etc. Cool, isn’t it?
Mark II respects your privacy
Mycroft doesn’t store every voice snippet it hears. It deletes the recordings as they come in.
Your data is safe by nature. It won’t result in you seeing ads on the internet about pizza just because you asked it about the best pizzeria in town.
You can, of course, opt to share your data for the improved development of Mycroft but this is NOT enabled by default.
Mycroft Mark II Technical Specifications
Here’s what Mark II is made of:
- Xilinx quad-core processor
- Far-field 6-microphone array
- Hardware AEC, beamforming and noise reduction
- Stereo sound with dual 2″ drivers (10W)
- 4″ IPS LCD touchscreen
- USB Type A
- MicroSD card slot
- Bluetooth in
- Wifi
- 3.5mm audio out
- 18W power supply with international adapters
Mark II officially speaks English. It is claimed to be working in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and German as well, but that’s in community mode for now.
Mycroft Mark II Pricing and availability
Mycroft has just launched a crowdfunding campaign. The initial goal of 40,000 Euro has already been achieved within a day.
Mycroft Mark II costs $129 and should be available in December 2018 for those who pre-ordered it via the crowdfunding campaign.
You can find more details Mark II and pre-order it on the Kickstarter page.
Why Not ?
Can you please edit the 7th word of the “Brief:”
My goodness! The Internet has spoiled people with the perfectly decent Latin-origin word cum.
The same way you cannot say ‘gay’ merrily anymore. Language is a living thing. But scholars do appreciate it, not so much the likes of Kylie Jenner and co. with their baes and af’s.
My bad kind sir. I was just trying to help a brother out. I wasn’t being a kunt
I would like to be kept whats going on with mycroft. It’s going to be very interesting.
Security and Privacy should not be the reasons you get a mycroft.
Mycroft voice processing works exactly the same way as Google and Alexa do in the wired article you point to.
The article in question does not match your statement `It was reported that these devices listen to the conversations, even when they are not active.`
While Mycroft isn’t currently advertising based, your metadata (probably) isn’t being shared with other companies. That said, Mycroft cannot afford the security team that Google and Amazon have, so chances are your data will just end up on the web.
What if they don’t gather data in the first place? This would make things much easier. Just like Signal messenger app. Even if someone would break it, he/she would find nothing of value since no data is stored in the first place. Just a though…
Hi John,
I just ran across this and wanted to correct a few misconceptions:
You said “Mycroft voice processing works exactly the same way as Google and Alexa do”. Not really, although I do understand why you might say that. As of today and by default the first stage of voice interaction (the speech to text or STT) is cloud based. So a recording of your speech is sent to a cloud to be transcribed. Under Google and Amazon system, all of the subsequent processing happens in the cloud also, so you have no idea what is occurring. Mycroft runs the remainder of the action locally, so you have the ability to audit (and modify, if you want) code. That alone is drastically different, imho.
But the key difference is “by default as of today”. We intentionally engineered Mycroft to be flexible. Even now you can configure Mycroft to utilize an alternative STT system, including one running directly on your own hardware. We have been working with Mozilla on the DeepSpeech technology and intend to push this down as close to the user as possible. I’m not certain if we will be able to run it directly on the Mark II (I’m suspect not), but at the very least we are giving you the option to control it and will continue working with the community to produce other options that support privacy — as well as functionality, such as operation when there is no internet connection.
Feel free to check out our source code on https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-core. The piece around this is in the mycroft/stt/__init__.py, including support for Google, DeepSpeech on our server, a local DeepSpeech instance, Watson, WIT, Bing, Houndify and Kaldi.
I don’t mind being bashed for technical reasons. But we really are pushing hard to build tech that is user-centric and that respects privacy.
– Steve
Using the WordPress analogy, analysis of website hacking reveals that the vast majority of hacks occur through plugins; that is, the “value adds” that third-party developers code to work with WordPress core. Even if I trust Mycroft (and I’m a paranoid sort to begin with, so probably not), what’s to stop a developer coding some backdoors into their extension? What if they don’t keep their extension up to date? What if they sell their extension to someone else without informing Mycroft Inc and someone else adds a backdoor?
Open source is good but, let’s face it, OSS doesn’t catch EVERY bug. Too many potential vulnerabilities for my liking. Pass.
Yes and here one has to be vigilant about the kind of extension to use.