ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales 0.1.0

Andrew Lang's Fairy Books provider skill for ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin

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 get good results from this provider - on other languages, matching against these English-only titles won't work well and stories will still be read in English regardless.

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). A search from a non-English device falls back to matching against the English index, so results will be poor and stories will be read in English regardless of the device's configured language.

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