Genie Community Forum

Call for testing: Almond 2.0 Alpha

Hello all!

I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of the new alpha release of Almond. This is the first public development release of a new and improved version of Almond.

This release is the first stepping stone towards Almond 2.0, and we’re looking for early adopters and contributors to help us make a great stable release. As previously announced, our goal is for Almond 2.0 to be the first truly usable assistant supporting the most important skills. We’re working to address problems in the skills we support, to ensure a good experience out of the box.

You can read more about this release in the release page in the wiki.

Included Skills

This release supports the following skills:

  • Spotify (music)
  • Home Assistant (IoT)
  • Weather
  • Jokes
  • Local restaurants
  • FAQs about the assistant itself

We expect the list of skills to grow by the time of the final 2.0 release.

Trying the Alpha

On The Web

The new version of Almond is available on our unstable cloud channel, at https://dev.almond.stanford.edu. You can create an account there to help us test the very latest version of Almond, as it is developed.

In Home Assistant

Users of Home Assistant can enable our unstable add-on repository at https://github.com/stanford-oval/almond-hassio-repository, and then install the “Edge” version of Almond to receive the latest version and all updates.

In Linux Desktops

Flatpak builds of Almond 2.0 Alpha are available at https://flatpak.almond.stanford.edu/

Giving Feedback

The best way to provide early feedback on the release is to use the new “recording mode”, which creates detailed logs that can be shared with us for debugging.

In local versions of Almond, recording mode is always enabled. Recordings can be shared with us using the button “Share Conversation Log” (in Almond Desktop, “Open Conversation Recording” from the hamburger menu).

In the web version of Almond, recording mode can be enabled with the toggle above the conversation. While enabled, the conversation recording is automatically shared with us for debugging.

Acknowledgements

In addition to our full-time team, I would like to give a shout out to our open-source contributors who made this release possible, and in particular:

  • Ryan Cheng, who maintains the Spotify skill
  • Aydan Pirani, who also helped develop the Spotify skill
  • Aurélio A. Heckert, who contributed a new dark-mode-friendly theme to Almond Desktop

And of course, I would like to thank all the contributors who have been testing Almond in the last few weeks, as we were still hammering out the last few bugs.

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