OVOS Common Query Framework

The OVOS Common Query Framework answers questions. It gathers answers from several skills and picks the best one.

Common Query is only as fast as the slowest CommonQuerySkill. Latency depends on which skills you install.

Features

Utterance query type detection: If the user utterance does not resemble a question (for example, it has no "who", "what", or "when"), the system does not try to answer.
Skill availability check: If no common query skills are installed, the system does not try to respond. It issues queries only when a matching skill is available.
Answer selection: A reranker plugin can evaluate multiple skill responses and select the most relevant one.
Bad answer discarding: A reranker with a minimum score threshold (min_score) discards poor or irrelevant answers.
Timeout for late answers: The system stops waiting for answers after 2 seconds. It ignores any response that arrives after this time.

Install

This plugin ships with ovos-core by default. You do not need to install it explicitly.

pip install ovos-common-query-pipeline-plugin

Configuration

Reranker (optional)

Rerankers, also called MultipleChoiceSolvers, are optional. Install one explicitly to rank and select the most relevant response from multiple common query skills (for example, Wolfram Alpha or Wikipedia).

This example configures a reranker:

"intents": {
    "common_query": {
        "min_self_confidence": 0.5,
        "min_reranker_score": 0.5,
        "reranker": "ovos-flashrank-reranker-plugin",
        "ovos-flashrank-reranker-plugin": {
          "model": "ms-marco-TinyBERT-L-2-v2"
        }
    }
}

Notes:

A reranker plugin is optional. Install it explicitly for the framework to use it.
The example uses ovos-flashrank-reranker-plugin with the ms-marco-TinyBERT-L-2-v2 model. Other plugins and models work too, depending on your use case and performance needs.
Reranking may add latency on resource-constrained devices, such as a Raspberry Pi. Adjust the settings to match the device capabilities and the expected response time.

OpenVoiceOS/ovos-core — the assistant this plugin ships with
OpenVoiceOS/ovos-plugin-manager — loads this plugin as an opm.pipeline entry point
OpenVoiceOS/ovos-flashrank-reranker-plugin — example reranker plugin

License

Apache-2.0

Metadata

Release files for ovos-common-query-pipeline-plugin 1.1.17a1

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for ovos-common-query-pipeline-plugin 1.1.17a1
File	Size	Uploaded
ovos_common_query_pipeline_plugin-1.1.17a1.tar.gz	19.1 kB	Sep 18, 2026	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for ovos-common-query-pipeline-plugin 1.1.17a1
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
ovos_common_query_pipeline_plugin-1.1.17a1-py3-none-any.whl 24.5 kB Sep 18, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 43.6 kB

Release files / ovos_common_query_pipeline_plugin-1.1.17a1.tar.gz

Download URL	ovos_common_query_pipeline_plugin-1.1.17a1.tar.gz
Size	19.1 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`86255d3b4fcf890664934453bc2e5ae287938c7e8e014e914d3e5a51be4a8e18`
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Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`

Release files / ovos_common_query_pipeline_plugin-1.1.17a1-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	ovos_common_query_pipeline_plugin-1.1.17a1-py3-none-any.whl
Size	24.5 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`46e7e941014f766af81b07e8f55de5c5133b45c1f5b731e68d75e89b45b0487a`
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Upload date	Sep 18, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`