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. It answers searches made in French (fr-*) and stays silent for every other language, and only loads where French is configured - the device language or secondary_langs (see "Languages" below).

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.

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. The index points at the page itself (/cache/epub/57892/pg57892-images.html), not at /ebooks/57892.html.images, which answered with two redirects. 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 book again. When a fetch fails, it is not tried again for five minutes, and an older copy is read meanwhile if there is one. When the cache directory cannot be written, the book's stories are kept in memory instead. Requests say who is asking: ovos-skill-cosquin-tales/<version> (+https://github.com/andlo/ovos-skill-cosquin-tales).

What is read is the tale, with its songs line by line (the doe's song in La Biche blanche is a <div class="verse"> and used to be skipped), without the page numbers ([p. 234]) or footnote numbers. Peuil & Punce is printed in the Lorraine dialect beside its French translation; only the French is read.

Languages

The provider loads only where French 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 French lists it there, even when the hub's own language is something else:

{
  "lang": "en-US",
  "secondary_langs": ["fr-FR"]
}

Once loaded, it decides per search whether to answer: a search made in French 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 get these stories on a hub whose own language is English, and an English session must not get French ones. A ping that names a language (the same way) only gets a pong when that is French. Fetching a story is never gated on language - it is addressed to this provider directly.

Title matching

The book prints every title in capitals (LA BICHE BLANCHE). Titles match regardless of case, accents, punctuation, & (read as "et") and a leading article, so "la biche blanche", "biche blanche" and "l'oiseau de verite" all find their story at full confidence; the part before a title's first comma counts too, slightly below the whole title ("la bourse"). The title that gets spoken is in ordinary case - La Biche Blanche, Le Roi d'Angleterre et son Filleul - since a TTS engine may spell capitals out letter by letter; content_id stays the index's own capitalised title. A search that names no title at all ("raconte-moi une histoire") gets one random story at confidence 0.9, or 1.0 when it named this collection.

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