Horoscope Readings (provider)

A provider skill for ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin, reading daily zodiac horoscopes aloud.

Sourced from freehoroscopeapi.com - a free, open REST API, no API key required.

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-horoscope-readings ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin

How this provider is architecturally different

Every other provider in this family scrapes or fetches a list of titles, caches it, and refreshes it periodically. This one doesn't - the 12 zodiac signs never change, so they're the entire "index", hardcoded and static. Only the actual horoscope text needs a live API call, made fresh every time (no caching), since it's different every day and the request is cheap and fast (a plain JSON REST call, no scraping).

Translation - two different mechanisms for two different things

1. Zodiac sign names ("Leo", "Løven", "Löwe", "Lion", ...) - fixed, well-known, enumerable terms, bundled per-language in locale/<lang>/zodiac_signs.json rather than relying on a live translation plugin for individual out-of-context words (which risks poor-quality single-word translations). Falls back to the English names for any language without a bundled translation.
2. The horoscope text itself - genuinely dynamic daily content, so this does use live translation, same pattern as ovos-skill-ovosblog/ovos-skill-arxiv-papers/ ovos-skill-365tomorrows-stories. Disclosed via "machine_translated": true/false in the search response.

Like those three translating providers, this one always loads regardless of device language (no SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES gate) - collection_hint aliases are loaded from locale/<lang>/collection.voc with an English fallback for any language we haven't translated - see ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin#26.

No "surprise me"

Unlike a story provider, a search with a matching collection_hint but no specific sign named declines to respond rather than picking one at random - reading someone the wrong zodiac sign's horoscope isn't a fun surprise, it's just wrong. You have to actually name a sign ("read me my Leo horoscope").

Collection hints

Responds to collection_hint values in the device's own language - e.g. "horoscope"/"zodiac"/"astrology" on English, "horoskop"/ "stjernetegn" on Danish - matched fuzzily against that language's own alias list (see locale/<lang>/collection.voc).

Content type

Identifies as content_type: "horoscope" or "astrology". A search with a content_type hint for anything else gets no response from this provider.

A regression worth knowing about

Early testing found ovos_utils.parse.match_one() picking "Pisces" for the phrase "leo horoscope" - its character-overlap scoring got confused by incidental shared letters once an extra word ("horoscope") was in the phrase, the same class of false positive as "andrew lang" scoring high against "andersen" elsewhere in this project. Fixed with _match_sign(): since zodiac names are a small, fixed, single-word vocabulary, an exact whole-word match is tried first, only falling back to fuzzy match_one() for near-misses (e.g. a slightly misheard STT transcription).

Credits

Content sourced from freehoroscopeapi.com - free and open, no API key required.

Category

Entertainment

Tags

#horoscope #astrology #zodiac #provider