- The assistant was rebranded as Genie. The wake word is now "Hey Genie";vthe web UI has a new neutral color scheme.
- Expanded the set of skill to support all the most commonly used skills:
- Timers, alarms, reminders
- Weather
- Music (Spotify)
- Podcasts
- News
- Radio
- IoT (Home Assistant)
- Question Answering (Bing)
- Yelp Restaurants
- All skills were improved and have higher accuracy as well as more natural and grammatical responses.
- Added one-off timers and more flexible time specifications such as "this weekend", "tomorrow at 9pm", etc.
- It is now possible to run separate Genie clients connecting to the same Genie server. This allows building "satellite" speakers that control the same Genie assistant running in Home Assistant or in the cloud. Note: running a standalone Genie client outside of a Genie server container is still experimental and might not work.
- The set of customizable phrases in each skill was expanded, allowing more flexible natural language generation.
- Genie can now start the dialogue with a custom command, and supports arbitrary follow-up at the end of a transactional command.
- Support for the RecurrentTimeSpecification type was completed. This is used for example by Yelp opening hours.
- In the cloud platform, Genie engines now store their data in the MySQL database. They can be terminated and restarted without losing data, which improves scalability to many users. A new Kubernetes controller was added to automatically start and stop engines as needed.
- The voice code was revamped and is now handled by a separate genie-client package, written in C++. This is more suitable to running on embedded devices.
¶ Experimental and Ongoing Work
- Added support for deciding if a command is correct based on confidence scores, as well as dispatching out to other services if a command is likely unsupported. This is experimental and currently not enabled.
- Added support for translating the assistant and the skills using Gettext. This is experimental and no language other than English is fully supported yet. Work is ongoing to support Italian, Chinese, Spanish.
The following components comprise the Genie 1.0 platform release:
- thingtalk: 2.1.0
- thingpedia: 2.10.0
- genie-toolkit: 0.9.0
- genie-cloud: 3.0.0
- genie-server: 3.0.0
- genie-client: 0.1.0