Bechstein Tales (provider)

A provider skill for ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin, delivering Ludwig Bechstein's German fairy tales.

Bechstein was a contemporary of the Brothers Grimm and published his own hugely popular collection - a genuinely different source, not just "more Grimm" (though a few titles overlap, since both drew from the same regional oral tradition).

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.

German only, no translation. Same situation as ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales, just for German instead of English - full fairy tale prose is a bigger translation cost/quality risk than a blog post or abstract. On any device language other than German, this provider never loads at all: initialize() checks the device's language against SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES = {"de"} before loading the index or registering any bus events, logging why. Set your OVOS device's language to German (de-*) to use this provider.

Install

pip install ovos-skill-bechstein-tales ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin

Story index

The story index (title, anchor per story) is bundled with this package (locale/de-de/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.

80 stories from Ludwig Bechstein's Märchenbuch (Project Gutenberg ebook #63465). The index was built once via scripts/build_index.py, which parses the book's own "Inhalt" (table of contents) table rather than assuming every <div class="chapter"> is a real story - one entry ("Alphabetisches Verzeichnis der Märchen", the book's own index) was correctly excluded this way since it has no story paragraphs.

Two real bugs were found and fixed while building this:

• Encoding: the Gutenberg page doesn't declare a charset in its HTTP headers, so requests defaulted to ISO-8859-1 and mangled German text (Aschenbrödel → Aschenbrödel). Fixed by setting r.encoding = "utf-8" explicitly.
• Drop caps: get_text(' ', strip=True) inserts a spurious space at drop-cap span boundaries (<span>E</span>s war einmal → E s war einmal, splitting the first word). Fixed by extracting text with no separator and instead collapsing the source HTML's line-wrapped whitespace with a regex - the same class of bug as ovos-skill-ovosblog's inline-<code> finding, different cause.

Collection hints

Responds to collection_hint values like "bechstein", "ludwig bechstein", matched fuzzily (see COLLECTION_ALIASES in __init__.py).

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.

Credits

Content sourced from Project Gutenberg. Scraping/extraction/caching logic ported from ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales.

Category

Entertainment

Tags

#stories #fairytales #bechstein #german #provider