[hellcow]

I'm building Abot, an open-source framework that makes it easy and fun to build digital assistants. We try to handle a lot of the heavy lifting you describe above, leaving you to create some cool things! You can see it here: https://github.com/itsabot/abot

I set out six months ago to do exactly what you describe (build my own digital assistant) but decided it would be more helpful to convert it into a framework and open-source it.

I'm happy to help you get started via our IRC or the mailing list, or discuss the challenges we've faced and specific solutions we chose and why.

[skewart]

That's awesome. I'm on my phone and just quickly read through the readme, but it seems a bit like Hubot on steroids. In other words, as easy to deploy and extend as Hubot, but with much more powerful NLP (and voice recognition too, no?)

It's a fantastic idea. I wonder if there's a way to share the data generated as people use it. I would imagine that everyone would benefit from this, though it would have to be anonimized effectively.

[hellcow]

Thank you :) No voice support yet but it's easy to add your own drivers to support external APIs. Official support for voice is coming in v.2 (ETA June 1st).

Yes, we will absolutely make it easy to share training data via opt-in! If I train a plugin, everyone should benefit without needing a GPU rig or 2 TB of data.