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). It answers searches made in English (en-*) and stays silent for every other language, and only loads where English is configured - the device language or secondary_langs (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

Fetching and what gets read

Reading a story fetches its book from Project Gutenberg once, extracts the text of every story in that book, and keeps it on disk under the skill's cache directory (<XDG cache>/mycroft/skills/<skill_id>/, one small JSON file per story). Another story from the same book, or the same story after a restart, needs no request. After 30 days a story is checked again with If-Modified-Since, which downloads nothing when the book has not changed; a change to the extractor (CACHE_FORMAT) fetches the books again. When a fetch fails, that book is not asked for again for five minutes, and an older copy is read meanwhile if there is one. When the cache directory cannot be written, the last book fetched is kept in memory instead. Requests say who is asking: ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales/<version> (+https://github.com/andlo/ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales).

What is read is the tale: paragraphs with the page's line wraps joined, and the rhymes line by line (they are <pre> blocks and used to be skipped). Footnotes and their numbers, the editor's note on where a tale came from ("Grimm.", "[From Ungarische Mährchen.]"), bare section numbers and Gutenberg's licence are left out. A story also ends where a tale the index does not have begins, instead of running on into 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).

The provider loads only where English is one of the languages the installation is configured for: the device's own lang, or one of secondary_langs in mycroft.conf. A single device in another language never loads it. A HiveMind hub whose users speak English lists it there, even when the hub's own language is something else:

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

Once loaded, it decides per search whether to answer: a search made in English gets an answer, any other language gets none. The language of a search is the pipeline plugin's lang field, else the language of the session the search came from, else (an older plugin sends neither) the device's own language. That matters on a HiveMind hub, where one ovos-core serves many users at once, each session in its own language: a French session must not get English stories, and an English session must still get them on a hub whose own language is French. A ping that names a language (the same way) only gets a pong when that is English. Fetching a story is never gated on language - it is addressed to this provider directly.

Title matching

Titles match regardless of case, accents, punctuation, a leading article and a leading "Story Of" / "History Of" / "Tale Of", so "the six swans" finds The Six Swans and "the three bears" finds The Story Of The Three Bears at full confidence. For "X, Or Y" titles each half counts too, slightly below the whole title: "cinderella" finds Cinderella, Or The Little Glass Slipper and "puss in boots" The Master Cat; Or, Puss In Boots. A search that names no title at all ("tell me a story") gets one random story at confidence 0.9, or 1.0 when it named this collection.

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