Developing chatbots for Mycroft and his virtual friends

Laurie Hannon introduces you to Mycroft, an open source virtual assistant similar to Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant. Laurie explains what it takes to code your own custom skill for Mycroft and details how Microsofts open source Bot Framework can be used for cross-platform chatbots.

Laurie Hannon introduces you to Mycroft, an open source virtual assistant similar to Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant. Laurie explains what it takes to code your own custom skill for Mycroft and details how Microsoft’s open source Bot Framework can be used for cross-platform chatbots. You’ll hear the Mycroft virtual assistant’s origin story and see a demo of the Mark I, Mycroft’s reference hardware. You’ll also get a grounding in chatbot concepts and definitions, including skills, dialogues, intents, and utterances, and learn how to write a custom Mycroft skill in Python. Laurie then demonstrates how to combine a Mycroft frontend with a backend in a different open source chatbot technology and showcases a Mycroft skill that calls a web service that is implemented with Microsoft’s open source Bot Framework and language understanding. You’ll then see a demo of the same web service with Amazon Alexa as a frontend, in place of Mycroft. Join in to explore the possibilities for making chatbot development easier across platforms such as Mycroft, Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant using common code.