Distribute on F-Droid

[nicolasmaia]

It would be amazing to have this on https://f-droid.org/ !

[paulscott56]

There was someone doing this a while back, not sure what happened there though. Would be cool if you could pick it up again

[nicolasmaia]

pinging @rudloff

[Rudloff]

Hello, We can't include this app in F-Droid because it requires the play-services-wearable library which is not free: https://github.com/MycroftAI/Mycroft-Android/blob/4418acbae3cfbaa41eeeb3a8dfd152cfa90c64bd/mobile/build.gradle#L84

[nicolasmaia]

Well that's a bummer. @paulscott56: is it possible to distribute a gradle flavor without this dependency?

[jleaders]

Is this on Google Play store? I couldn't find it there. Please add the app store icons / links to the Readme.md

[vn971]

Alternatively, try to understand what is really needed from play-services-wearable, and consider using an alternative?

Search on github reveals only 2 places that use Wearable: https://github.com/MycroftAI/Mycroft-Android/search?q=wearable&unscoped_q=wearable

Guessing by the name, a web request made instead could possibly solve the problem.

[vn971]

Note that a play-services-wearable dependency also blocks de-google-ified users from using Mycroft. This audience intersects with Mycroft audience heavily! Naturally, if you avoid Amazon and opt for Mycroft, you may already have your phone de-google-ified long ago.

Maybe up the priority, to have a greater audience reach? The real issue is then not only to publish on F-Droid, but also make the app really runnable for all users. Even for those who installed from APK / Aurora Store / Yalp. Being buildable by F-Droid would be an excellent test to make sure the goal is really reached.. ;-)

[igoralmeida]

I got a Pi4 recently to run mycroft-core and thought I could give this a try.

F-Droid

Turns out it was fairly easy to get F-Droid to build the apk. I simply continued what was mentioned in #104 and kept removing stuff until it worked (for me®). The result is 82c686, which can be used with an appropriate fdroiddata yml file (Yes, it's a local path there). I don't have most Play stuff enabled on my phone, though, so chatting is fine but speech input doesn't work with this commit.

Speech input

Next I tried to do some sort of bypass in the app and get mycroft-core itself to do the speech processing (pretty much the last bullet points in #82 ).

I did this with 8af1a7, which basically hijacks the STT button to serve as start/stop recording. Once recorded, the file is sent as

{"data": {"filebytes": "<base64-encoding>"},
 "type": "mycroft.mic.recordedfile",
 "context": null}

The ugly part is that the base64 string shows up in a chat bubble. I don't really understand how that part works, so it could use some love from more knowledgeable people.

Core

In mycroft-core, the handler for mycroft.mic.recordedfile is similar to mycroft.mic.listen.

1. First thing is to use audiofile to convert the file to a .wav (I had to install ffmpeg)
2. It bypasses the wakeword checking by setting ResponsiveRecognizer._listen_triggered
3. Then ResponsiveRecognizer (temporarily) uses Wave_read.readframes in place of _record_phrase.

Code is at c6c5c4. The working copy in my pi4 is still dirty due to debugging stuff, so (while unlikely) I might have missed something.

Future

No idea. I'm not creating PRs for these because it's proof-of-concept code. I had to delete the entire wear module, for example, but an actual F-Droid implementation would perhaps use a prebuild line or a separate "flavor" (IIUC).

I'm happy to answer any questions and will fix anything that prevents people from reproducing what I did, but I will not be distributing any APKs.

It was quite fun to hack this, props for the well-structured codebase. Thanks.