Andrew Lang Tales (provider)

A provider skill for ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin, delivering Andrew Lang's twelve "Coloured" Fairy Books.

"These fairy tales are the oldest stories in the world." — Andrew Lang, preface to The Green Fairy Book

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.

English only, no translation. Unlike ovos-skill-andersen-tales/ ovos-skill-grimm-tales (real per-language sources) or ovos-skill-ovosblog/ovos-skill-arxiv-papers (machine-translated), this provider has no non-English content and does not attempt to translate - the stories themselves are long, literary prose, where per-request machine translation is both expensive and a much bigger quality risk than translating a short blog post or paper abstract (see ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin#5 for the reasoning). Your OVOS device's language needs to be set to English (en-*) to use this provider at all - on any other language, the skill never loads (see "Languages" below).

Install

pip install ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin

Story index

Unlike the other providers here, the story index (title, book, author, Project Gutenberg anchor per story) is bundled with this package (locale/en-us/index.json), not scraped live - browsing/matching needs no internet at all. Only fetching a specific story's actual text (once chosen) needs a live request to Project Gutenberg.

382 stories across 11 of Andrew Lang's 12 "Coloured" Fairy Books (the 12th, the Olive Fairy Book, uses an incompatible page-based anchor scheme on Gutenberg and isn't included - tracked as a known gap, see scripts/build_lang_index.py's docstring).

The index was built once via scripts/build_lang_index.py, which:

• Fetches Andrew Lang's master index (Gutenberg ebook #30580)
• Repairs anchors for books Gutenberg has since re-published with a different scheme (Red and Brown Fairy Books)
• Validates every entry actually extracts real text before including it

Languages

English only. Andrew Lang's Fairy Books are sourced from Project Gutenberg in English; no other language editions exist for this collection, and this provider makes no attempt to machine-translate (see the note above). On any other device language, this provider never loads at all: initialize() checks the device's language against SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES = {"en"} before loading the index or registering any bus events, and logs a clear message explaining why, rather than loading fully and declining searches at runtime. Set your OVOS device's language to English (en-*) to use this provider.

Collection hints

Responds to collection_hint values like "andrew lang", "lang", "the fairy books", matched fuzzily (see COLLECTION_ALIASES in __init__.py). "lang" alone is short enough to be worth double-checking for false positives - verified via match_one against "grimm", "andersen", "arxiv", "language", etc.

Content type

Identifies as content_type: "story" or "tale". A search with a content_type hint for anything else (e.g. "article", "paper") gets no response from this provider.

Credits

Content sourced from Project Gutenberg. Scraping/extraction logic ported from ovos-skill-worldtales (archived - this provider supersedes it).

Category

Entertainment

Tags

#stories #fairytales #gutenberg #provider