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.

Regional translations

This release ships 39 complete locale resource sets, including 15 newly completed regional variants of languages this skill already supports. Shared wording is inherited; regional differences live in thalovant_skill_custos_fallback/locale/regional.json. Existing regional translations are preserved. This is resource coverage, not certification by native speakers or a guarantee that every voice provider supports these accents.

Edit the source language or the manifest, then run thalovant-skillkit locales --write and thalovant-skillkit check --no-fleet. Commit the generated files too. See the regional authoring guide for examples and the translation review checklist.