Hello everyone,
I would like to extend everyone our best wishes of a happy 2021!
With those, I would like to share our plans for the next release of Almond, which will be the long promised Almond 2.0.
You can find our plans on the wiki as usual, but the highlights will be:
- restoring IoT support through Home Assistant
- feature parity with Almond 1.8 (minus any feature that we did not see significant usage of)
- an improved natural language model, based on the BART model from Facebook, which yields an across-the-board 5% improvement in accuracy
- integrating ThingTalk 2.0, an easier and more powerful programming language for expressing the commands
The release will happen on the stable version of Almond and Thingpedia, aka almond.stanford.edu. With that, almond-dev.stanford.edu, which currently contains Almond 1.99, will go back to being a development snapshot of the very latest version of Almond.
The first deployment of the new Almond backend to almond-dev will happen this afternoon (Pacific time). Furthermore, new developer access to almond-dev will be curtailed. In the future (not immediately), Thingpedia devices in almond-dev other than those officially supported by the Almond team might be deleted, so I recommend you make a local backup as soon as possible.
I want to thank anyone who has tested or is currently testing Almond 1.99, and allow me to apologize in advance for any disruption.
Hope you’re all excited as we are for the new release, and if you would like to help us finish it (contribute features, test, feedback, etc.) let us know!