HOLMES IV

HOLMES IV (formerly mycroft-lib) is a repackaged version of mycroft-core

Mike, alias Adam Selene, alias Simon Jester, alias Mycroft Holmes, officially an augmented HOLMES IV system, is a supercomputer empowered to take control of Lunar society, which achieved self-awareness

HOLMES IV is named after the HOLMES IV system from the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, It is the system the next generation of voice assistants will be built on top of

It is aimed at developers and makers interested in building on top of the mycroft stack, if you are a end-user that just wants to install mycroft please see the official repository

For an enhanced version checkout the successor project HolmesV

• HOLMES IV
  • Features
  • Objectives
  • Install
  • Compatibility

Features

HolmesIV tries to be a drop-in replacement for mycroft-core, most changes are just cleanup and moving imports around, however there are some notable new configuration options:

Feature	Mycroft	HolmesIV
backend	required	optional
internet connection	required	optional
msm	required	optional
padatious	required	optional
ntp sync	hardcoded list of platforms (forced)	optional

Objectives

• facilitate the development of projects on top of the mycroft-core
• repackage mycroft-core as a library that can be easily distributed
• modularize mycroft-core into small reusable components
• minimize the amount of dependencies required for a given setup
• maximize the amount of platforms HolmesIV can be used on
• do not break the established mycroft-core API other projects rely on
• transparently load skills developed for mycroft-core
• transparently integrate with any project developed to interface with mycroft-core
• it should always be possible to run HolmesIV with the same exact configuration as mycroft-core, given that all system requirements are met
• versioning should indicate the state of HolmesIV synchronization with mycroft-core
  • main version number is the date of last sync with dev branch on mycroft-core

Install

The main assumption of HolmesIV is that you may want to run only some pieces of the mycroft stack, this means the requirements vary wildly depending on the use case.

eg, if you are making a web chatbot you do not want the audio stack at all

by default HolmesIV will only install the bare minimum requirements common to all individual mycroft services

pip install HolmesIV==2021.9.8a1

you can perform a full recommended install with

pip install HolmesIV[all]==2021.9.8a1

Additional requirements

Skills

the skills service is the most customizable

msm and padatious needs to be explicitly installed, automatically disabled if unavailable

pip install HolmesIV[skills]==2021.9.8a1

Bus

if you want to run the messagebus (instead of connecting to an existing one)

pip install HolmesIV[bus]==2021.9.8a1

Enclosure/GUI

if you want to run the enclosure service in order to connect mycroft-gui

pip install HolmesIV[enclosure]==2021.9.8a1

STT

if you want to perform speech recognition

pip install HolmesIV[stt]==2021.9.8a1

to install optional STT engines (google cloud)

pip install HolmesIV[stt_engines]==2021.9.8a1

TTS

to install optional TTS engines (gTTS)

pip install HolmesIV[tts_engines]==2021.9.8a1

Audio Service

if you want to install optional audio backends (vlc + pychromecast)

pip install HolmesIV[audio_engines]==2021.9.8a1

Compatibility

you can only install one of HolmesV, HolmesIV or mycroft-core, they can not run side by side, each of those is an enhanced version of the former

Because Holmes is a drop in replacement that means import mycroft would conflict between alternative versions

HolmesIV runs skills made for mycroft-core and interfaces with all known mycroft projects, see the awesome-mycroft-community for a selection of projects that you can integrate with HolmesIV