Andersen Tales (provider)

A provider skill for ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin, delivering Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales.

"Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale of all." — Hans Christian Andersen

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-andersen-tales ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin

Languages

Sourced live from andersenstories.com, which offers exactly 7 languages: EN, DA, DE, ES, FR, IT, NL.

This provider does not translate. It loads only for the languages the installation is configured for - the device's own lang plus secondary_langs in mycroft.conf - that it supports. If none of them is one of the 7, it never loads at all: initialize() builds no index, registers no bus events, and logs a clear message rather than silently serving English (or any other) content.

For each configured, supported language it builds its own story index, and each search is answered from the index of the language it was made in: the pipeline plugin's lang field, else the language of the session the search came from, else the device's own. A single device builds one index, as before. A HiveMind hub serving users in several languages lists them in secondary_langs:

{
  "lang": "en-US",
  "secondary_langs": ["da-DK", "de-DE"]
}

A search in a language the installation doesn't serve gets no answer at all. A search with no title ("tell me a story") gets a random story at 0.9, and titles match regardless of case.

Author/collection name and collection_hint aliases are also per-language, not hardcoded English - a Danish device announces "H.C. Andersen" / "H.C. Andersens Eventyr" instead of the English "Hans Christian Andersen" / "Andersen's Fairy Tales". See locale/<lang>/collection.voc (aliases) and locale/<lang>/collection_meta.json (author/collection name), loaded via OVOS's own resource file resolution rather than Python constants - see ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin#26 for the full reasoning. This also means every supported language has its own locale/<lang>/skill.json, so the Skills Store can see this provider genuinely supports 7 languages, not just English.

Collection hints

Responds to collection_hint values in the device's own language - e.g. "andersen"/"hans christian andersen" on English, "andersen"/"h.c. andersen" on Danish - matched fuzzily against that language's own alias list (see locale/<lang>/collection.voc).

Content type

Always identifies as content_type: "story". A search with a content_type hint for anything else (e.g. "article", "poem") gets no response from this provider.

Credits

Content sourced from andersenstories.com. Scraping/caching logic ported from ovos-skill-fairytales.

Category

Entertainment

Tags

#stories #fairytales #andersen #provider