Snips Maker Release 1.0

Published in

Snips Blog

6 min readMay 2, 2018

Today we are excited to announce a new major release of the Snips Platform and Console. It provides great new features for makers like personal wake words, the app store, and a new tool to easily install and update assistants on-device. We are also introducing the next level of tools for developers, with super easy ways to create apps and an API to enrich vocabulary directly on-device, without having to change your assistant in the app store.

This is a major milestone on the road to a feature-rich desktop and mobile app store, targeted for release by end of this year. Our team has been working around the clock to make the app store the most powerful, user-friendly platform for building voice assistants. And we hope developers will enjoy creating incredible apps to control IoT devices and invent new usages for voice assistants!

Developers and makers will be able to fully control their home environment with voice, making remote controls completely irrelevant.

Snips Voice App Store

With more than 14,000 developers and makers building 25,000 assistants, the time has come to upgrade the experience with new, streamlined features.

One of the biggest new features is the app store. We transformed our Bundle Store containing only models describing the recognition of the final user’s intentions to an app store that extends Bundles with actions that actually do something in response to the recognized intents. In the figure below, the “Bundle” describes how the model recognizes a user’s queries about lights (like “Hey Snips, turn off the light”) without actually turning off the light. The “Actions” are triggered when the intent is detected, and will react accordingly to actually turn off the light. The “Bundle” + “Actions” pair is a “voice app”.

As of today, once developers create their apps, they can publish these apps directly to the app store in just one click. Using a super simple tool, Sam, makers will be able to deploy these pre-built, community-rated apps. Lights, speakers, coffee makers, TVs and much more will be controlled with voice, keeping all personal user data private.

Write and Publish your Apps

Aside from the improved bundle building tool, the new app store proposes 3 ways to attach actions to your intents:

by adding little snippets of Python code to each intent that will be executed when the intent is detected (we will also support JS in the near future);
by selecting a GitHub repository containing code that will be run locally on your device;
by bridging the intents to any of the 1,000+ Home Assistant components.

In the figure below, check out the main interface to write actions in mere minutes for the app Smart lights.

Three simple ways to create actions in apps

Take a look at the video below to see the new app store in action.

Personal Wake Words

The Snips Platform now allows any user to create their own personal wake word. This personal wake word will initiate a voice dialogue between a user and their connected device, and can only be used by the user who installed it.

By giving just three samples of the new wake word, your Snips-powered device will generate the necessary model to use this wake word. This wake word will not be speaker agnostic but rather, speaker specific. Everything you need to deploy your own wake word is available in this step-by-step guide.

Dynamic vocabulary injection, the path to personal context awareness support

One of the constraints of voice recognition is the fact that it can only recognize words it was trained to recognize. This can be a real issue in many situations where personal data is involved:

in queries that involve your contact names, like “call <first name> <last name>”, you have no guarantee the names are part of the ASR vocabulary.
in any situation where the users can freely name entities they are manipulating, like their playlists in a music application or the rooms in their home (e.g. Turn the lights on in Roya’s bedroom).

As explained here by our CTO Joseph Dureau, even the biggest actors in the industry struggle to support such use cases with acceptable performance.

To solve this problem, we added an API to dynamically add words (through MQTT messages) to the Language Model of the ASR. The model is automatically retrained in a few seconds and the platform will recognize additional new words immediately thereafter.

This technique also opens access to a huge catalog, like music songs, using heuristics: most users listen to a very small subset of the whole music catalog and want new songs available. With our platform, you can have the base model containing the vocabulary of the popular subset and use dynamic injection to add new songs every week.

The Snips Maker Kit

On top of the software release, we are very pleased to announce our first hardware device: the limited edition Snips Maker Kit. It contains all the necessary hardware components (in a cool package) to make voice assistants with Snips in a few minutes.

Visit the Maker Kit page to be one of the first to order yours!

And more…

Check our release notes to see the full list of new features, like support for iOS, reduced footprint in memory and disk, and much more.

We’ve also debuted a dedicated website specifically for Makers, with access to all the best resources to #MakeWithSnips! And, of course, you can join us on Discord to be in touch with our community of makers and experts.

The Road Ahead

With the new app store, we focused on making voice control deployment easy and seamless for developers. Over the next few months, we encourage all interested developers to create apps within the app store and upvote worthy apps from others.

Once the app store has matured with ample apps available and vetted, we will launch V2. Until then, we have greatly simplified the process of building your own voice assistant to deploy to all your connected devices.

Summary

The app store is a developer release designed to be “feature complete” for developers to easily build their voice assistants. The app store has become far more powerful and user-friendly than we had conceived ten months ago when we originally launched the Snips Console.

Our team is growing and development is occurring at record pace. Our NLU repository has been in the top trending python repositories in all of GitHub this past month! We look forward to building the app store with developers and creating a skills-rich experience for future releases!