365tomorrows Stories (provider)

A provider skill for ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin, reading flash science fiction from 365tomorrows.com aloud - the full archive (~7600 stories at time of writing), not just the latest few.

A new short story (≤600 words) every day since 2005, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 - attribution required, non-commercial, no derivatives (reading the text aloud unmodified is a straightforward reproduction, not a derivative work).

This skill has no standalone voice interface. It registers no intents and never speaks. It only answers ovos.common_reading.* bus messages, so you also need ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin installed and added to your pipeline config for it to be useful at all.

Install

pip install ovos-skill-365tomorrows-stories ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin

Source

Indexes the full archive, not just recent stories: paginates through WordPress's REST API (wp-json/wp/v2/posts, filtered to the "Story" category - excludes the site's separate "Voices of Tomorrow" audio posts and "Fragments"), ~7600 stories at time of writing across ~76 pages of 100. Refreshed at most once every 24 hours (the archive is mostly static - only ~1 new story/day).

Each listing page already includes full post content, so the index captures each story's author (parsed from its first paragraph, always Author: <name>) without a second request per story - only reading a specific chosen story needs one more request, to that story's own wp-json/wp/v2/posts/<id> endpoint.

(An earlier version of this skill used the RSS feed instead, which only exposes the ~10 most recent stories - the REST API change was made specifically to reach the full archive.)

Translation

Only in configured languages. It translates only into the languages this installation is configured for: the device's own lang plus secondary_langs in mycroft.conf. A search or ping in any other language gets no answer, so a request in a language nobody here speaks never loads a translation model or translates the title catalogue. A HiveMind hub serving users in several languages lists them in secondary_langs.

Unlike the Gutenberg-sourced fairy-tale providers in this family (ovos-skill-andersen-tales, ovos-skill-grimm-tales, ovos-skill-bechstein-tales, ovos-skill-cosquin-tales, ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales), this provider does machine-translate for non-English devices - same approach as ovos-skill-ovosblog/ ovos-skill-arxiv-papers. These are short (≤600 word), self-contained stories, a much smaller translation-quality risk than a full fairy tale's literary prose (see the reasoning in ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin#5).

Matches search phrases against translated titles and discloses via "machine_translated": true/false in the search response. If no translation plugin is available, this provider does not respond to searches at all for a non-English device, rather than silently offering English content the user didn't ask for.

Collection hints

Responds to collection_hint values in the device's own language - e.g. "365 tomorrows"/"tomorrows" on English, "science fiction noveller" on Danish, "racconti di fantascienza" on Italian - matched fuzzily against that language's own alias list (see locale/<lang>/collection.voc). Like ovos-skill-ovosblog/ ovos-skill-arxiv-papers, this provider works on any device language, so aliases fall back to English for any language we haven't bothered translating - see ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin#26. The collection name itself ("365tomorrows") stays untranslated - it's a proper noun.

Content type

Identifies as content_type: "story" or "tale". A search with a content_type hint for anything else gets no response from this provider.

"Surprise me"

A search with no specific phrase but a matching collection_hint returns the most recent story, by publish date.

Credits

Content from 365tomorrows.com, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Author credited per-story via the author field in every search response.

Category

Entertainment

Tags

#stories #scifi #flashfiction #creativecommons #provider