Genie Community Forum

Rebranding Almond

#1

As mentioned in the other post, we’re starting a new initiative to turn Almond from an academic prototype to a real, usable product. (Don’t worry, we’ll stay open-source!). As part of this transition, we’ll be rebranding away from Almond in the next few months.

The name for a virtual assistant is very important: it’s the word you’ll say every time you talk to it!
So we would like you, our community, to help us choose a new name.
We have a few options we’re considering ourselves, but we’re also looking for suggestions and alternatives. We’re also interested in feedback from international users, on how they’d feel using each name as wake word. We’re looking for a single name that works across all languages.

The options we are considering are Mario, Coco, Genie, and Nico.

Any more suggestions? Comments? Feedback?

Announcing the new name: Genie
#2

To me, Mario is too culture specific, Coco has a lot of room for jokes, and Genie sounds like a kitchen product. But Nico is fairly neutral. This might also be too culture specific, but to me a name that might be a British butler would work. Maybe Lloyd.

#3

Thanks for your feedback!

Can you elaborate a bit of why you think Mario is too culture specific?

#4

I think rebranding is the right way, but rebranding and renaming the project don’t implies you have to change wake up word

I really like to call my assistant “computer”, it’s very nerd and it make me feel a star trek man.

Overall it’s the real name: it’s a thing acting as a person does, but it’s not a person.
So I’d like you to keep present name or, at least, make people able to select a name.
it’s not a good idea to have all voice assistant having the same name.
Look at mycroft project, user can chose one of the three proposed " wake up worlds", it’s a good compromise

Sorry for my poor english.

#5

That is very good point about “computer”, but I fear many users would disagree on the value of something “nerdy”.
And as you point out, many assistants out there offer multiple wake words: for example, Alexa offers “Alexa”, “Echo”, and “Computer”.

At the same time, it’s very expensive to make a high-quality wake word, so we’ll have to focus our energy on one word to start. We might offer other words as an advanced option to accomodate problematic edge cases, like people in the household with the same name, but we cannot promise the same level of quality.
Also, unfortunately, Mycroft’s technology, which we experimented with a lot, didn’t really work for us. Maybe it would work better for general words like “Computer” where a lot of existing data is available.

#6

Google assistant has no human name wake word to keep it gender neutral and not only:

I’m thinking to women named Alexa, did you guess how many boys make fun of their Alexa human “friends”?
I think nobody will name her daughter Alexa in the future. Alexa will not be a human name anymore! Shame!
It’s a social abuse, IMHO; this is my thought since I knew about Amazon echo human name.
Amazon is a corporate company seeking profits only, but open source projects born in university environment should seek people rights, equality, freedom for software and for people too.
Please, keep people able to name their sons/daughter as their Grandpa/Grandma was named…

Have nice days

#7

Yeah we’re well aware of the “Alexa” problem, and the damage it caused to the Alexa given name.
That’s why we’re still discussing other names.

Again, I want to stress that we absolutely wish to support multiple wake words, but building wake word detectors is not a trivial task, and we’ll have to do one at a time. It’s quite possible we’ll keep supporting “computer” as a secondary wake word though, given the amount of datat that Mycroft and others have collected for it.

#8

Is there somewhere you would suggest to watch so we have the most current information as this unfolds?

#9

Hi! We don’t yet have any information to share publicly regarding the rebranding, but when that’s decided, we will post in the forum for sure.

#10

Hello all

I am new to home assistant and as soon as i heard that almond exist i downloaded it and am using it in my (very limited ) home automation environment.

I truly appreciate the effort you are all putting into almond.

The fact that it is open source and that it runs locally is brilliant.

I understand that it is a work in progress and a lot still need to be done.

One of the features i would like to see activated is the ability to change the wake word for almond.
Unfortunately i will not be using the more developed home assistant environment until early next year.

Beyond the automation i will want to develop voice activated process ( for example (control kodi, plex, emby and adhoc functions that will override the automations).

Certain of these automation will relate to shutters turn on/off hot tub and HVAC functions

How can i help?