Grimm Tales (provider)

A provider skill for ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin, delivering the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales.

"He who is too well off is always longing for something new." — from "The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage," Brothers Grimm

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.

Install

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

Languages

Sourced live from grimmstories.com, which supports 8 languages here: EN, DA, DE, ES, FR, IT, NL, PT.

Grimmstories.com actually offers 20 languages total - the other 12 (FI, HU, VI, TR, PL, RO, RU, UK, EL, ZH, JA, KO) aren't included here yet since they fall outside OVOS's actively-tracked language set. Portuguese is Grimm-only among the 8 supported here - no equivalent Andersen source exists in Portuguese.

This provider does not translate. It loads only for the languages the installation is configured for - the device's own lang plus secondary_langs in mycroft.conf - that it supports. If none of them is one of the 8, it never loads at all: initialize() builds no index, registers no bus events, and logs a clear message rather than silently serving English (or any other) content.

For each configured, supported language it builds its own story index, and each search is answered from the index of the language it was made in: the pipeline plugin's lang field, else the language of the session the search came from, else the device's own. A single device builds one index, as before. A HiveMind hub serving users in several languages lists them in secondary_langs:

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

A search in a language the installation doesn't serve gets no answer at all. A search with no title ("tell me a story") gets a random story at 0.9, and titles match regardless of case.

Author/collection name and collection_hint aliases are also per-language, not hardcoded English - "the Brothers Grimm" only makes sense to announce on an English device; a Danish device hears "Brødrene Grimm" instead, and a Danish user saying "brødrene grimm" as a collection_hint matches correctly (not just by luck, the way it would have if we'd only shipped English aliases). See locale/<lang>/collection.voc (aliases) and locale/<lang>/collection_meta.json (author/collection name), loaded via OVOS's own resource file resolution rather than Python constants - see ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin#26 for the full reasoning. This also means every supported language has its own locale/<lang>/skill.json, so the Skills Store can see this provider genuinely supports 8 languages, not just English.

Collection hints

Responds to collection_hint values in the device's own language - e.g. "grimm"/"the brothers grimm" on English, "grimm"/"brødrene grimm" on Danish, "grimm"/"die gebrüder grimm" on German - matched fuzzily against that language's own alias list (see locale/<lang>/collection.voc).

Content type

Identifies as content_type: "story" or "tale". A search with a content_type hint for anything else (e.g. "article", "poem") gets no response from this provider.

Credits

Content sourced from grimmstories.com. Scraping/caching logic ported from ovos-skill-fairytales and ovos-skill-andersen-tales.

Category

Entertainment

Tags

#stories #fairytales #grimm #provider