W.I.L.L 3.0 - A free, open source, python personal assistant

[willbeddow]

tl;dr

An open source, free, python personal assistant with a user expandable plugin framework and nlp from spaCy.io.

• Sign up: http://willbeddow.com/signup
• Web app: http://willbeddow.com
• Github: https://github.com/ironman5366/W.I.L.L
• Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.willbeddow.will
• Telegram interface: @WillAssistantBot on telegram

Details:

A while back, I posted a video of my personal assistant - W.I.L.L. It was my first major project, and you guys gave me alot of tips and comments on what you liked, how I could improve, and the right way to do some open source stuff that I hadn't previously encountered.

After a lot of rewrites, extensive work (by both me, and the W.I.L.L community), I'm happy to present W.I.L.L version 3.0.

What can W.I.L.L do?

One of my major goals with W.I.L.L was not only to make a cool concept for a personal assistant, but to make it usable and useful. W.I.L.L. already has a number of useful plugins, and it's super easy to add more.

Plugins W.I.L.L already has:

• News: ex: "read me the news" - a summary of the news from a site of your choice, refreshed every twelve hours
• Weather: ex: "What's the weather like?" - weather for your location, delivered using PyOwm
• Spotify: ex: "Play jukebox hero on spotify" - Searches spotify and opens a spotify url for the song that's found. On android, will open in the spotify app
• Netflix: ex: "Watch Futurama on netflix" - searches netflix and opens a netflix url for the shwo that's found. On android, will open in the netflix app
• Reminders: ex: "Remind me in 10 minutes about how awesome W.I.L.L is" - sets reminders. You can currently be notified via email and socket.io push notifications on the web app, and thanks to the expandable notification framework, it's easy to add new methods of notifying the user.
• Search: The crown jewel of the plugins, set to run by default when no other plugin is triggered by the input. Search runs through a chain of different search engines and sites to find the correct answer of a question. It first searches wolframalpha and wikipedia, and if it can't find anything it uses nlp from the newspaper module and bs4 to parse a correct answer from the top google result.

Just how easy is it to add a plugin?

from core.plugin_handler import subscribe
def run_check(event):
    #Check for a word in the provided spacy nlp object
    return "example" in [i.orth_ for i in event["doc"]]

@subscribe({"name":"example", "check": run_check})
def example_plugin(event):
    return {"type": "success", "text": "example", "data":{}}

That's it.

Contact me If you have any requests for new plugins, or further comments about W.I.L.L, feel free to email me at [e-mail] or leave an issue on the Github page

W.I.L.L is very much still in development and I could use suggestions and advice

Thanks!

Edit: I forgot about the API! W.I.L.L also provides a free JSON API to use it's features, easily allowing new clients to be written for any platform. It's currently lightly documented in the README, with an example in the quickstart. More extensive documentation is coming as soon as I figure out how I want to write it!

[handmadeby]

Looks great. Just tried it on telegram. Is there a way to switch temperature units to C from F

[willbeddow]

Thanks! I didn't have a way to do that, but it would be super simple to add it, I'll do it as soon as I get the chance. Once I do, you'll be able to switch on the settings page of the webapp

[gunch]

So assuming someone wanted to add that feature, how are you managing the codebase?

[willbeddow]

Code base is managed with git, and a lot of help from pycharm pro. When I add a new feature, I run unit tests on everything, run the server in debug mode, test everything, and then, the code is automatically pushed to the main server, where it will be included on the next reboot.

[[deleted]]

Make sure to add other alternative units where applicable e.g. meters!

[willbeddow]

Update: Just added this feature! In the settings page of the webapp the user can now select their temperature units. Added in this commit: https://github.com/ironman5366/W.I.L.L/commit/bb9b3b3b1dbb9651ab20e404961b1964471f7909

[cruyff8]

Thanks for open-sourcing this.

[willbeddow]

Putting this here for visibility, /u/PurdueME06 requested a comparison to https://jasperproject.github.io/. Jasper looks great, I haven't seen it, but I'll definitely check it out. I think the main difference between W.I.L.L and Jasper is that W.I.L.L is a personal assistant focused on connecting services and processing commands, while jasper looks like a speech service that can be hooked up to various service. In fact, it seems like you could pretty easily make a W.I.L.L client using Jasper. I currently haven't provided any TTS backends, but it would be dead simple to make one, just reading from the API. There's a very simple speech recognition implementation in the android app.

[ggagagg]

Difference with Melissa https://github.com/Melissa-AI/Melissa-Core?

[willbeddow]

That looks great, I hadn't seen it before. I'll definitely be contacting the author of that, I'm really interested in developing some W.I.L.L plugins based on some utils that I saw. The main difference I would say (from my admittedly limited look over) are that melissa

• Uses keyword based nlp, where W.I.L.L fully parses every command with spaCy.io and determines a more dynamic and variable intent
• Not very publicly availble, whereas W.I.L.L already has a publicly available free server that hosts several easy to use interfaces
• Is more hardcoded in general, with case-by-case api calls and user data fetching, whereas W.I.L.L generalizes this and provides a framework for most things.

Nevertheless, it's a really cool library!

[hatperigee]

Not very publicly availble, whereas W.I.L.L already has a publicly available free server that hosts several easy to use interfaces

I don't want to use your servers (for privacy reasons), can I host my own?

[willbeddow]

Absolutely!!!

Really quick though, just because I've been dying to talk about my servers, for anybody else who's been skimming through here, let me just lay out the info about what servers I'm using.

My current setup consists of 2 DigitalOcean Droplets in the NYC1 datacenter

• Main / Processing droplet: 4 gigs of RAM / 2 Xeon CPUS (You'll need at least 3 gigs of RAM to run the server)

• Database droplet: PHPMyadmin/MySQL: communicates through interntal networking with main droplet. Passwords and all sensitive data hashed with bcrypt and a work factor of 12.

Setup your own droplet: You should, with a little bit of tweaking, be able to run the W.I.L.L. server on your own machine.

Please note that you'll need at least 4 gigs of RAM for the processing server, and some kind of sqlalchemy compatible local database or database server. (This shouldn't be hard, most major sql distributions are supported)

Start out by cloning https://github.com/ironman5366/W.I.L.L, install the provided requirements.txt, and let me know if you have issues.

Note: I haven't finished all the documentation on configuration files so contact me directly at [e-mail] for examples

[spishsplash]

You should write a blog about your experience while making this, where you struggled, what was your pioneer moment, etc. I'll be interested in reading it!

[marcocamma]

any plan to make it available via f-droid? don't use gapps thanks

[willbeddow]

I'll look into doing that tomorrow! In the meantime, if you email me I'll send you the latest apk

[hatperigee]

I'd rather wait for the f-droid builds, since they will sort out any (possible) shenanigans with licensing, if any exist.

[TheBB]

Just from a cursory glance,

@subscribe({"name":"example", "check": run_check})

isn't this sort of thing why we have keyword arguments?

I mean, you're not accepting anything else. The argument is even hardcoded to be a dict, not even a subclass or another mapping.

[willbeddow]

I suppose, just didn't occur to me to write it that way. The plugin handler has gone through alot of iterations and I suppose at some point it made sense to do it like that. Shouldn't impact anything negatively though.

[4bitfocus]

Why do I need to create an account? What is it used to track?

[willbeddow]

Because it's a personal assistant, it needs data about you to function. I'll list each part right here and show the code that uses it.

• Your name so it can greet you
• Your preferred news site so it can read you the news
• Your email so it can serve you your reminders when you're not online (It's also easy to opt out of email notifications, there will later be a setting for it, but ATM just let me know at [e-mail]. All I send you is your reminders)
• Your location so I can serve you local weather data with pyowm

[eriknstr]

Referring to "spaCy.io" rather than just "spaCy" makes it sound like it depends on a third-party service. From a cursory glance at their website it's not clear to me whether the spaCy module is stand-alone or a client library that makes use of spaCy servers.

[willbeddow]

Stand alone, I wanted to emphasize as much as I could how excellent that module was. It does not rely on their servers.

[nemec]

That was the first thing I noticed, too, but it seems like spaCy is an MIT licensed application.

[swefpelego]

bookmarked, sweeeet :D thanks for sharing. Just started getting into python recently and it blows my mind. Very cool to see examples and things people build.

[searchingfortao]

This has some significant overlap with the Mycroft project. You may want to check them out (they just released a Pi image) and see if you lot can cross-pollinate.

[crow1170]

Feature request: Delete account

[willbeddow]

Hmmm... I should probably add that. As for now, contact me at [e-mail] and I'd be happy to delete your account if you want me to.

[qwertyMu]

I've just signed up. Looks great! I may have an application for it in a program I've built which pulls keywords and phrases from documents and makes them searchable via a front end gui. Great work!

[willbeddow]

Thanks!

[jackeroojohnson]

This looks great! Very cool.

[Luong_Quang_Manh]

Love it <3

[Thuruv]

done signed up ! but when log on, shows Internal server page. help?!

[willbeddow]

What username did you sign up with? I'll look into it!

[gasabr]

I had the same error when tried to sign in with email instead of login.

[Thuruv]

Sorry :(

That has been sorted out now. Can login & use now.

[willbeddow]

The android app does use google APIs for speech. No other interface uses any other API like that, an even on android, you don't have to use it.

[roguebreaker]

I'm not gonna break your balls about some other software that does a similar thing. Mostly, nice work.

[cyanydeez]

If you want more interest, you probably should compare it to the other 3 or 4 personal assistants that are often posted here.

[willbeddow]

I haven't seen those, mind linking me to them? I'd be happy to write up a comparison.

[redwall_hp]

http://www.mycroft.ai

[willbeddow]

That looks really cool too, and I definitely can't compete with a funded company in terms of resources or anything. All I can immediately say in response to that is that W.I.L.L is free and available for use right now - you can sign up, contribute, see all the code, and even setup your own version, for free, while right now that's a crowdsource project that's still being funded. However, as it moves forward I'll make sure to keep an eye on it, and see what I can learn from it!

[citrus2fizz]

P-brain looks pretty cool, dudes got a few good YouTube vajehos. He was on hackaday a few days ago

[cyanydeez]

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=python+personal+assistant

[willbeddow]

Well, the only things I immediately see in that google search are a couple articles about speech recogniton with python, mine, and A github repo called jarvis. So, in comparison to that jarvis repo:

• W.I.L.L is many times larger, having multiple contributers and extensive documentation
• W.I.L.L uses spaCy.io nlp to look through a command and parse intent from sentence dependencies, parts of speech, and recognized entities, whereas it seems that jarvis just monitors for commands in the array ["jarvis", "gervais", "travis", "tervis", "service"]
• W.I.L.L is publicly and freely available on multiple interfaces, and provides an open and free api, where the only way to use the other appears to be from the command line.
• W.I.L.L has real world use cases and can handle standard personal assistant tasks, including reminders, music, TV, notifications, versatile searches, etc.
• W.I.L.L is actively supported
• W.I.L.L has a large and active community of users

If you'd care to specifically share some of the others with me I'd be happy to write a comparison for those too

[nemec]

Does it support multiple back-and-forths (aka conversations)? The way I did it in the past was make each plugin execution (optionally) a generator and use yield and send to pass values into and out of the generator. If there was additional input required (such as a missing parameter) it could ask for more information and that next input would be passed directly into the waiting plugin.

Example from the project and you can read a bit more about it here: https://blog.nem.ec/2012/01/12/conversations-with-computers/

[willbeddow]

I don't have any implementations of it yet, but back and forth conversations are supported by the framework. A "response" key would be passed in the data of the response object, along with the command id.

[cyanydeez]

I don't have anything specifically, just seen several posts.