Initial Raspberry Pi MyCroft (PiCroft) install

Notes on my first install of MyCroft, an open source alternative to voice recognition technologies like Siri or Echo.

Surprisingly, this worked pretty well "out of the box," with stuff I had lying around* (Caveat, thanks to my non-profit work, I have a LOT of stuff lying around.) Specifically:

Raspberry Pi 3 with the default Picroft image
Any RCA 1/8th speaker (i.e. the standard classic wired type — the HDMI monitor I use happens to have an old-school audio jack and that's fine)
Separate USB audio "card" (they recommend a usb audio mic as opposed to the onboard one, this is a tiny cheapo card with RCA headset attached and it'sne also fine)

Did the first run with the monitor and the keyboard and everything worked pretty smoothly. You have to sign in and create an account with the mycroft people.

There's a few glitches at first , I'm getting a weird duckduckgo when doing math calculations. It keeps asking for a timer; though eventually you do get your answer. I was able to fix this with the solution here:
https://community.mycroft.ai/t/solved-duckduckgo-error-traceback/10291/3

(quickly, drop into a terminal and install the newer duckduckgo thing via Github, like..
msm install https://github.com/JarbasSkills/skill-ddg

Reboot. You also need to reboot to, e.g. change voices, which you do from the website?

Also, couldn't get it to reboot via voice; had to SSH in to do that. (Overall, familiarity with getting Raspberry Pi's up and running is strongly recommended here.)

Nearly *inexplicably*, I can't seem to find a "skill" (that's what it calls its discrete abilities or functions) that easily exposes the outputted text to, e.g., a bash script.

Overall, the thing still phones home A LOT, and appears to need to be continually connected to the mycroft.ai website. But it still appears to be a damn sight better and more hackable than what we've got now. More to come?

@hacknote

Backlinks: Journal:2021:05:15