Custos Fallback

Your voice assistant should never just go quiet on you.

Ask it something it doesn't know, and normally nothing happens at all. No answer, no "sorry" — just silence, and you standing there wondering if it even heard you.

This adds the missing reply:

"I cannot answer that. Ask me about incidents, or how this appliance is doing."

That's the whole skill.

Install

pip install thalovant-skill-custos-fallback

Nothing to set up. It only speaks when no other skill could help, so it never gets in the way.

Works with any OpenVoiceOS assistant.

Anything else

• How it works — for the curious, and for anyone hacking on it
• Apache-2.0 licensed. Use it, fork it, ship it.

Privacy and verification

Unmatched requests produce a localized refusal. Logs record the outcome and resolved language without retaining the raw question, which may contain personal information. The skill uses no network service.

Native OVOScope tests load every shipped locale and check that its refusal reaches the originating session. Separate behavior tests cover fallback priority, missing input, packaged resources, and the absence of raw speech in logs.

python -m pip install --pre -e '.[test,e2e]' build
python -m pytest -q test --ignore=test/end2end
python -m pytest -q test/end2end
python -m build
thalovant-skillkit check-artifacts . --wheel dist/*.whl --sdist dist/*.tar.gz

Passing resource and dispatch checks does not establish native-speaker review of every translation.

For the current OVOS stack, use --pre as shown above. If deliberately testing legacy Workshop 8.0.0, also install "setuptools<81": its older plugin manager imports pkg_resources, which newer setuptools releases removed. This is a legacy environment constraint, not a runtime-wide setuptools restriction.