As avid readers may know, I used to work in DevRel for an open source voice assistant company called Mycroft.AI. In the past two weeks, Mycroft AIR

The Mycroft Mark II and the wind-down of Mycroft AI: it’s all about ecosystems, infrastructures and the friction of privacy

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2025-01-09 17:30:11

As avid readers may know, I used to work in DevRel for an open source voice assistant company called Mycroft.AI. In the past two weeks, Mycroft AI’s CEO, Michael Lewis, has announced that the company is winding down operations, and will be unable to fulfill any further Kickstarter pledges. In this post, I first give the Mark II a technical once-over, and conclude that it’s a solid piece of kit. So, why couldn’t a privacy-focused voice assistant go to market and reach adoption in age of growing awareness of surveillance capitalism 1Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power: Barack Obama’s books of 2019. Profile books. , datafication 2Sadowski, J. (2019). When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction. Big data & society, 6(1), 2053951718820549. and commodified, open hardware? In the second half of this post, I take a critical lens to voice assistants more broadly, and reflect on the ecosystems, infrastructures and other components that are needed to provide value to the end user – and why voice assistants are currently hitting the “trough of disillusionment”.

For full transparency, it’s important that I state that as part of my contract arrangement with Mycroft – I contracted for around 18 months between September 2017 and January 2019 – I was offered, and took up, stock options – although they’re now worthless.