Genie Community Forum

Making audio calls!

Skill Suggestions
#1

Making and answering audio calls - either by phone or an app - would really be the killer app for me. Being able to say “Genie, call Alex” or “Genie, call mum on Element/Skype/Nextcloud Talk” would be amazing.

Obviously, this would need to be built on a couple of foundational skills, namely:

  1. Access to contacts
  2. Access to an app capable of making audio calls.

For contacts, I would suggest a contacts skill that connected to carddav, as an open standard for contacts, used by large, self hosted projects like NextCloud and many others. Knowing the users contacts could also open up other options like the early demos of Almond where one server could access a contacts almond server (with permission, of course!)

For calling, you could either have the server pair with a phone by bluetooth, or access a webapp by api (eg Matrix with Element, or Skype for Web)

#2

We actually used to have an android version of the assistant that lookup contacts and make phone calls. However, as a very small research team, we are unable to maintain so many platforms and skills. So we had to shut down that project and trimmed down the skills we support at the moment.

Our hope is that the open-source community could contribute new skills - building all skills in-house is never going to scale anyway. We are currently working on an sdk to make it easier for developers to add new skills.

1 Like
#3

So is the original code that you used to have for that available under a FOSS license somewhere? It would be much easier for a community member to update older code, than to create it from scratch, I imagine.

#4

Yes, you can find the git repo here: https://github.com/stanford-oval/almond-android