Skill Development Overview¶

In a nutshell

This tab covers building and maintaining an OVOS skill: the code that teaches the assistant to do a specific thing. It walks from a first minimal skill through intent design, testing, and the full skill API, and it covers porting an existing Mycroft skill. For LLM-backed conversational behavior instead of a fixed skill, see the Agents tab.

This tab is for developers building or maintaining an OVOS skill, the add-ons that teach the assistant to do things.

Start here¶

Your First Skill: build a minimal working skill end to end.
Anatomy of a Skill: what files a skill needs and what each one does.
Intent Design: how OVOS decides which skill handles an utterance.
Test Your Skill: run and check your skill before shipping it.

Tutorials¶

Worked, copyable examples of common skill patterns, once you've built the first-skill walkthrough above.

Skill Cookbook: worked recipes for common skill patterns.

Guides¶

Longer-form guidance on design, deployment-tested practice, and keeping a skill working across OVOS versions or ported from Mycroft. Start with Best Practices if the skill already works and you want it to hold up in production.

Design Guidelines: voice user interface design.
Best Practices: patterns that hold up in real deployments.
Migrating from Mycroft: porting an existing mycroft-core skill.
Version-Compatible Skills & Plugins: supporting multiple OVOS versions at once.
For Skill Maintainers and Updating from Older OVOS: keeping an existing skill current.

Logic & Intents¶

The mechanics of matching an utterance to a skill and handling it once matched: the two intent styles, session and context state, and how a skill talks back to the user.

Adapt Intents and Padatious Intents: the two intent styles.
Asking the User, Intent Context (gating), Intent Layers, Permissions & Activation Control, Continuous Conversation, Sessions (multi-user state).
Dialog & Statements, SSML, Customization, skill.json.

Skill APIs¶

Reference pages for the base classes and helper APIs a skill can call. Start with the ovos-workshop overview to see how the pieces fit together.

Advanced Skill Types¶

Skill base classes for specific, non-default behavior: catching unmatched utterances, answering open questions, playing media, or running across multiple devices.

Fallback Skills, Common Query Skills, Media Skills (OCP), Universal Skills.

More¶

Skill Dev F.A.Q.: answers to common questions.
Testing Reference (ovoscope): the full testing toolkit.

Building an AI persona instead of a fixed skill? That's the Agents tab. Need the intent-matching internals? That's the Pipeline tab.