OVOS Blog

A provider skill for ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin, reading the OpenVoiceOS blog aloud.

This exists to prove a point: common-reading isn't just for fairy tales. It's an "article" provider, not a storyteller.

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-ovosblog ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin

Source

Feeds from https://blog.openvoiceos.org/feed.xml (RSS 2.0). The feed already contains full article HTML in <description>, not just a summary, so no separate page fetch is needed - just the feed itself (refreshed at most once an hour, matching the feed's own <ttl>60</ttl>).

Translation

Only in configured languages. It translates only into the languages this installation is configured for: the device's own lang plus secondary_langs in mycroft.conf. A search or ping in any other language gets no answer, so a request in a language nobody here speaks never loads a translation model or translates the title catalogue. A HiveMind hub serving users in several languages lists them in secondary_langs.

The feed is English-only. If the device language isn't English, this provider machine-translates:

• titles, before matching a spoken phrase against them (a Danish user speaks a Danish phrase, so that's what has to be matched - not the English original), and
• the full article text, when actually reading it aloud.

using whatever ovos-plugin-manager language-translation plugin is configured (OVOSLangTranslationFactory.create()).

Every search response includes a "machine_translated": true/false field - ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin is expected to disclose this before reading the content aloud, so users know it's a machine translation rather than an original-language text.

If no translation plugin is installed/configured, this provider does not respond to searches at all for a non-English device - it would be misleading to offer an article it can only actually deliver in English when the user asked in (and expects) their own language. (English devices never need a translator and always get a response.)

Note for anyone comparing providers: unlike ovos-skill-andersen-tales/ovos-skill-grimm-tales/ ovos-skill-andrew-lang-tales, which check a fixed SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES set at load time and refuse to load at all otherwise, this provider always loads regardless of device language - it can't know in advance whether a translation plugin will be available, so it always registers its bus events and decides per-search instead (see above).

Collection hints

Responds to collection_hint values in the device's own language - e.g. "ovos blog"/"openvoiceos blog" on English, "ovos nyheder" on Danish, "blog de ovos" on Spanish - matched fuzzily against that language's own alias list (see locale/<lang>/collection.voc). Unlike ovos-skill-andersen-tales/ovos-skill-grimm-tales (a fixed set of languages), this provider works on any device language, so aliases fall back to English for any language we haven't bothered translating

• see ovos-common-reading-pipeline-plugin#26. The collection name itself ("the OpenVoiceOS Blog") stays untranslated
• it's a proper noun, not a generic phrase.

Content type

Responds to content_type hints of "article", "blog", "news", or "post". Ignores everything else (e.g. "story", "poem").

"Surprise me"

A search with no specific phrase but a matching collection_hint (e.g. "read me something from the OVOS blog") returns the most recent post, by pubDate.

Credits

Content and feed from blog.openvoiceos.org, maintained by the OpenVoiceOS community.

Category

News

Tags

#news #blog #openvoiceos #rss #provider