New Voice!

The long-awaited new feminine voice for Mycroft is now available! Members at home.mycroft.ai can choose the 'American Female' voice at https://home.mycroft.ai/#/setting/basic. The Alan Pope voice still is and always will be available for all. (#1173)

Default skills...redefined

The core default skills are now defined by a list on the mycroft-skills repo (see https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-skills/blob/master/DEFAULT-SKILLS). This decouples the list from a specific build, allowing new defaults to be added at any time. Additionally, platforms can also have unique defaults -- for example allowing a KDE installation of Mycroft to pull down KDE/desktop related skills (see https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-skills/blob/master/DEFAULT-SKILLS.kde). The current list of platforms is 'picroft', 'mark-1' and 'kde'.

The list of default skills is defined by the community run Mycroft Skills Team.

Portuguese Internationalization

• Began Portuguese (Pt-pt) support. Thanks @JarbasAI! (#1049, #1177)

Fixes

• The Chromecast audio backend would stop playback on initial connection, sometimes interfering with existing playback. (#1123)
• ISSUE #1141: The TTS audio cache could be cleared before or during playback, occasionally interfering with responses (especially when the disk is nearly full). Also allowed minimum_size not just a minimum percentage, which is less useful when dealing with very large drives. (#1168)
• Upgraded to Padatious 0.3.6, fixing issues with registering entities. (#1149)
• Modified dev_setup.sh build of py2cairo and pygobject to avoid "too many arguments" message on Arch Linux. Thanks @darkphoenix! (#1157)
• The next spoken utterance was consumed if no speech was occurring when mycroft.audio.stop_speaking() was called. (#1167)
• Error messages were spoken during skill download even when "speak=False" was specified (#1183)

Misc

• Major refactor of the mycroft.configuration module. This clarifies and simplifies some of the logic and allows patches to survive a reload of the config. (#1110, #1176, #1179)
• Allow msm.sh, mycroft-start.sh and mycroft-stop.sh to be invoked from different working directories. Thanks @roadriverrail! (#1021)
• Added g++ to dev_setup.sh dependencies (#1150)
• Reduced some of the 'noise' in the logs. (#1180)
• Disabled experimental "Location" context from the default. It was lingering and causing confusion at times, but is still available for more experimentation. (#1181)
• In the 'mycroft-use' utility, separated the connection between the mycroft-core implementation and the backend. Now specifying 'stable' and 'unstable' only changes the Debian package. To change the backend connection, specify 'home' or 'home-test' in a subsequent call, e.g. "mycroft-use unstable" followed by "mycroft-use home-test".