Cosquin Tales (provider)

A provider skill for ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin, delivering Emmanuel Cosquin's collection of Lorraine (French regional) folk tales.

A genuinely different register than ovos-skill-perrault-tales-style literary fairy tales: these are folk-collected, with the collector's own comparative scholarly notes ("Remarques") on how each tale relates to variants told elsewhere in France and abroad (excluded from what's read aloud - see below).

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.

French only, no translation. Same situation as ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales/ovos-skill-bechstein-tales, just for French. On any device language other than French, this provider never loads at all: initialize() checks the device's language against SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES = {"fr"} before loading the index or registering any bus events, logging why. Set your OVOS device's language to French (fr-*) to use this provider.

Install

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

Story index

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

30 stories from volume 1 of Cosquin's "Contes populaires de Lorraine" (Project Gutenberg ebook #57892). The index was built via scripts/build_index.py, which scans for <h2 id="ROMAN_NUMERAL"> headings (the book's own per-story anchoring) and excludes non-story sections (front matter, appendices) by requiring the id to actually look like a Roman numeral.

Known gap: volume 2 not included. Volume 2 (ebook #50838) uses a different, page-number-based anchor scheme (<a id="Page_N"> nested inside an unlabelled <h2>, rather than the h2 itself carrying a roman-numeral id) - the same class of problem that excluded the Olive Fairy Book from ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales. Not handled yet; a follow-up could add volume 2's ~30 additional stories with a second anchor-extraction path.

Story extraction stops each tale at the following <h3>REMARQUES</h3> - the scholarly comparative commentary that follows every story here is deliberately excluded from what gets read aloud, not just the next story's heading.

Collection hints

Responds to collection_hint values like "cosquin", "lorraine", "lorraine tales", "contes de lorraine", "emmanuel cosquin", 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 and ovos-skill-bechstein-tales.

Category

Entertainment

Tags

#stories #fairytales #folklore #cosquin #lorraine #french #provider