The goal of this release is to bring Almond 1.99 to a level of stability that can be enjoyed by a wider set of users.
This release brings in the latest version of the Genie Toolkit, and a curated, high-quality set of skills that have been extensively tested to deliver a good user experience.
The release includes the following fully supported skills:
Additional skills are supported by the community on a best-effort basis.
All skills have been extended with new features, and made it work reliably across all the supported Almond platforms. In particular, compared to Almond 1.99:
This release also includes the latest GenieNLP model, based on the BART pretrained language model and the Bootleg named entity disambiguation models. This should ensure a significantly higher accuracy of understanding commands. Additionally, the wake-word have been improved, and no longer wakes up spuriously.
Finally, the release includes a "recording mode", enabled across all supported Almond platforms, that allows to easily obtain detailed recordings of a conversation, for testing and debugging.
This release includes ThingTalk 2.0, a major redesign of the ThingTalk language that improves developer usability as well as accuracy of semantic parsing. More details of the changes are in the ThingTalk changelog. The ThingTalk documentation has already been updated to ThingTalk 2.0.
The Genie toolkit was expanded, with many new features and new annotations to improve the user experience on both voice-only (with richer support for template-based language generation) and graphical devices (with new card and multimedia outputs, and pluggable APIs for custom graphics).
The command line tools previously known as thingpedia-cli
are now part of Genie, which now offers a single solution for custom skills and custom voice assistants.
Support for running Almond Cloud in Kubernetes was also expanded. Almond now supports Kubeflow Serving, for robust and scalable serving of NLP models.
The following modules are part of this release:
The release will happen when all release-blocking bugs have been either fixed or postponed.
Bugs are release-blocking if they are marked with the "Almond 2.0 Alpha", "Almond 2.0 Beta" or "Almond 2.0" milestones. General release criteria apply to triage blocking bugs.