Following up from my previous call for testing, I am very happy to announce the immediate availability of Almond 1.99, the latest release of the Almond virtual assistant!
Release Notes
This release is a culmination of more than one year of effort to develop new technology in how we build virtual assistants. This release is too big to list all features individually, so here are the highlights:
- This is the first release to fully support multiturn interactions. The release makes full use of the Genie Toolkit to support complex conversations.
- The old Almond Dialogue Agent and the old ThingEngine are no more: both have been merged into Genie, to form a single coherent solution for chatbots and virtual assistants.
- The ability to understand questions and database queries has been greatly improved, by integrating the latest version of Schema2QA.
- The Spotify skill has been rebuilt and can identify songs much more precisely.
This release is a stepping stone towards Almond 2.0, the first general purpose release with the new technology. The release will be available to local Almond users (almond-server, almond-gnome) using the unstable delivery channels (dockerhub latest tag, and nightly builds of the flatpak). It will be available on our development Almond server, https://almond-dev.stanford.edu for Almond developers and testers. At a later time, when we can ensure no regressions compared with the previous Almond 1.8, we will also release it on the stable channels and at https://almond.stanford.edu.
Included Skills
- Spotify (stable)
- Weather (stable)
- Joke (stable)
- Yelp restaurants (experimental)
Module versions
The following modules are part of this release:
Core Almond
- thingtalk: 1.11.0
- thingpedia: 2.8.0
- genie-toolkit: 0.7.0
- genienlp: 0.4.0
- thingpedia-cli: 0.5.0
Almond Applications
- almond-cloud: 1.99.0
- almond-gnome: 1.99.0
- almond-server: 1.99.0
Module Deprecations
The following components are no longer part of Almond:
- thingengine-core: its functionality was merged in genie-toolkit
- almond-dialog-agent: its functionality was merged in genie-toolkit
- thingpedia-discovery: temporarily removed as discovery is not part of Almond 1.99 (might be reintroduced later)
- almond-cmdline: now available as the “genie assistant” command
- almond-tokenizer: no longer needed, as tokenization is part of genie-toolkit
- almond-android: no longer supported
Deployment
The release is already available on our development server and on the unstable deployment channels. So go ahead and enjoy it!