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JarbasAI edited this page Jan 10, 2022 · 8 revisions

The HiveMind Wiki

Welcome to the HiveMind wiki!

HiveMind is a community-developed superset or extension of Mycroft, the open-source voice assistant.

With HiveMind, you can extend one (or more, but usually just one!) instance of Mycroft to as many devices as you want, including devices that can't ordinarily run Mycroft!

HiveMind's developers have successfully connected to Mycroft from a PinePhone, a 2009 MacBook, and a Raspberry Pi 0, among other devices. Mycroft itself usually runs on our desktop computers or our home servers, but you can use any Mycroft-branded device, or OpenVoiceOS, as your central unit.

Join Hivemind Matrix chat for general news, support and chit chat

Getting started

NOTE: Hivemind-core is also available as a Mycroft skill. You can use it either as a standalone program or as a Mycroft skill, but you can't run them both at the same time. During early development, testers are encouraged to choose this repository over the skill, as development takes place here.


At this moment development is in early stages, but mostly stable. Functionality is limited to basic questions and answers, but only because we haven't implemented the bit that lets Mycroft re-activate the mic to continue a discussion.

Full tutorials will follow later. For now, you wanna do this:

  1. Clone this repo onto the computer or device that's running Mycroft.
  2. Note the scripts in the examples folder. These are enough to spin up your Hive and connect to Mycroft from another device.
  3. Edit examples/add_keys.py to create names and keys for your devices. You can use HiveMind without encryption, but it's discouraged for security reasons. (NOTE: HiveMind uses AES, so keys need to be exactly 16 characters long. This is far more secure than it sounds. Your bank probably uses it. So does the United States government, for some purposes.)
  4. Ensure Mycroft is running.
  5. Run examples/mycroft_master.py. Your Hive is now running, and you're ready to connect. See here to find a client or terminal (ideally the Voice Satellite). You will need to know the hostname or IP address of the computer or device running Mycroft, and you'll also need the device name and key you created earlier.

The main configuration can be found at

'~/.cache/json_database/HivemindCore.json'