majel 0.2.1

A front-end for Mycroft that allows you to do cool things like stream video or surf the web.

Majel

A Mycroft extension that lets you do visual things with it as well.

What can it do?

Majel listens to the Mycroft message bus framework and performs various desktop jobs based on what it comes down that pipe. The result is that you get Mycroft's standard skills along with:

Youtube player

Say Hey Mycroft, youtube <query> and it'll search Youtube for your query, pick the first hit, and play it full screen in a loop.

Kodi

If you've got a local Kodi installation and the video files you've got in there are also mounted locally, you can say Hey Mycroft, play <query> and it'll look for query in your Kodi library. If it finds it, it'll play it with mpv locally. It's also smart enough to know which episodes you've seen, so if you say Hey Mycroft play Star Trek Deep Space Nine and you've already seen all of season 4, it'll start with s05e01. It'll also pick up right where you left off in that episode.

Netflix & Amazon Prime

The play keyword will also fall back to Netflix or Amazon Prime if you don't have Kodi installed, or simply don't have the video you were asking for. In this case, it'll hit up the Utelly API to see which streaming service has the movie/show you asked for, and then point your browser to that show and play the next episode.

Note that this functionality requires two things: a Utelly API key (it's free for limited use, and we've got built-in caching so you'll never break the 1000/mo limit) and a subscription to Netflix and/or Amazon Prime.

Browser Bookmarks

If you store your bookmarks in Firefox, you can say Hey Mycroft, search my bookmarks for <query>. This will rank your bookmarks by relevance to your query and display a list of everything it found within a threshold. The list appears as a touchscreen-friendly UI so you can say "Hey Mycroft, search my bookmarks for chicken" and select from your 12 favourite chicken recipes.

Configurability

Configuration of the skills is done separately for each skill via Mycroft's standard settings UI at home.mycroft.ai. That's where, for example, you input your YouTube API key and Utelly API key.

Majel is configured by way of a single config file you place in /etc/majel.yml. Simply copy the example file from the root of this project as a starting point and edit the values in there to fit your preference. Full details on what values do what are in the example file.

What's Next?

It'd be nice to have support for doing video calls: Hey Mycroft, call my parents, but that may not be easy to do since most video calling platforms seem to either be centred around scheduled group chat (Jitsi/Zoom), or just plain Linux/browser hostile (Skype). Perhaps combining Pygui with Signal could do the job though...

This is Complicated, I Need Help

Getting Mycroft up and running locally can be difficult, and setting it up in concert with Majel is even more fiddly. To make things easier, there's a handy scaffolding app that combines Docker+Mycroft with Majel to make things a little easier. If you want to try this out, that's probably your best first step.

Colophon

For Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who was amazing.