This release is primarily a bug fix release, but there are many "under-the-hood"
improvements and improvements for developers.
- The initial experience in Web Almond was improved to provide more suggestions to start.
- It is now possible to sync multiple phones against the same Web Almond account.
- The Thingpedia pages have been redesigned and made more user-friendly, with more
explanation of each function.
- Users can now login to Web Almond with their Github account as well.
- Web Almond now offers Readline-like history.
In thingtalk:
bookkeeping
language. This new language allows to express commands that are
not programs but are necessary for the correct operation of the dialog agent, such as yes,
no, stop, etc.
- Map, sound effect, media output types are now available for formatted query output.
Note that availability of these types is platform-specific; they fallback to plain text
if not supported.
program
examples can have parameters now.
In thingengine-core:
- Improved support for builtin devices, allowing platform developers to provide
custom functionality without changing the library.
- Improved i18n support.
In genie-toolkit:
- Genie now includes templates for the new bookkeeping language in ThingTalk, which
makes it easy to add new commands and provide translations.
- Improved tooling to use Genie from the commandline (without an associated Thingpedia
web server).
In almond-cloud:
- almond-cloud is now easier to configure and to deploy, and has expanded installation
and configuration instructions
- New Thingpedia API: /entities/create and /strings/create to upload
new entities or string datasets (useful for scripts).
¶ Experimental features and work in progress
- Chinese support is being improved, and has learned to distinguish Traditional and Simplified
Chinese. It is still experimental and only available for custom versions of Almond
- We added experimental support for contextual commands (commands whose meaning
changes based on the previously issued commands); this enables follow ups such as:
"what is the weather in Palo Alto?" -> "what about San Francisco?". Support for contextual
command is available in Genie and in the NLP training/inference code but requires a yet-to-be-merged
patch to the client.
- The NLP server now includes an experimental frontend classifier. This classifier
determines a confidence level that the user input is a supported ThingTalk
command, a general-knowledge question (suitable for a search engine) or a chatbot
command. The API is experimental and the dialog agent does not make use of this
information yet.
Many thanks to our contributors and collaborators, in particular:
- Elvis Yu-Jing Lin and Johnny Hsu from National Taiwan University, who are working on support for Chinese
- Ryan Cheng who contributed the Login With Github support, and the experimental frontend classifier
- Tanay Sonthalia who implemented history support in Web Almond
- thingtalk: 1.7.2
- thingpedia: 2.4.0
- thingpedia-client: 0.2.4
- thingengine-core: 1.5.0
- almond-dialog-agent: 1.4.0
- almond-cloud: 1.5.0
- genie-toolkit: 0.3.0
+---------+----------------------+--------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Date | Milestone | Releases | Notes |
+=========+======================+==================================================+=====================+
| 6/1 | Everything | | |
+---------+----------------------+--------------------------------------------------+---------------------+