AI Agents in OpenVoiceOS

OpenVoiceOS (OVOS) introduces a flexible and modular system for integrating AI agents into voice-first environments. This is made possible through a layered architecture built around solvers, personas, and persona routing components. This section explains how these parts work together to enable intelligent conversations with customizable behavior.

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Solver Plugins (Low-Level AI)

At the core of the AI agent system are solver plugins. These are simple black-box components responsible for handling a single task: receiving a text input (typically a question) and returning a text output (typically an answer).

Key Features:

• Input/Output: Plain text in, plain text out.
• Functionality: Usually question-answering, though more specialized solvers exist (e.g., summarization, multiple choice).
• Language Adaptation: Solvers are automatically wrapped with a translation layer if they don't support the user's language. For instance, the Wolfram Alpha solver is English-only but can work with Portuguese through automatic bidirectional translation.
• Fallback Behavior: If a solver cannot produce a result (returns None), higher-level systems will attempt fallback options.

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Personas (Agent Definition Layer)

A persona represents a higher-level abstraction over solver plugins. It behaves like an AI agent with a defined personality and behavior, built by combining one or more solvers in a specific order

Key Features:

• Composition: Each persona consists of a name, a list of solver plugins, and optional configuration for each.
• Chained Execution: When a user question is received, the persona tries solvers one by one. If the first solver fails (returns None), the next one is tried until a response is generated.
• Customizable Behavior: Different personas can emulate different personalities or knowledge domains by varying their solver stack.

{
  "name": "OldSchoolBot",
  "solvers": [
    "ovos-solver-wikipedia-plugin",
    "ovos-solver-ddg-plugin",
    "ovos-solver-plugin-wolfram-alpha",
    "ovos-solver-wordnet-plugin",
    "ovos-solver-rivescript-plugin",
    "ovos-solver-failure-plugin"
  ],
  "ovos-solver-plugin-wolfram-alpha": {"appid": "Y7353-XXX"}
}

💡 personas don't need to use LLMs, you don't need a beefy GPU to use ovos-persona, any solver plugin can be used to define a persona

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Persona Pipeline (Runtime Routing in OVOS-Core)

Within ovos-core, the persona-pipeline plugin handles all runtime logic for managing user interaction with AI agents.

Key Features:

• Persona Registry: Supports multiple personas, defined by the user or discovered via installed plugins.
• Session Control: The user can say "I want to talk with {persona_name}" to route their dialog to a specific persona.
• Session End: The user can disable the current persona at any time to return to normal assistant behavior.
• Fallback Handling: If OpenVoiceOS can't answer, the system can ask the default persona instead of speaking an error.
• Extensible: Potential for future enhancements via messagebus to adjust system behavior based on persona (e.g., dynamic prompt rewriting).

in your mycroft.conf

{
  "intents": {
      "persona": {
        "handle_fallback":  true,
        "default_persona": "Remote Llama"
      },
      "pipeline": [
          "stop_high",
          "converse",
          "ocp_high",
          "padatious_high",
          "adapt_high",
          "ovos-persona-pipeline-plugin-high",
          "ocp_medium",
          "...",
          "fallback_medium",
          "ovos-persona-pipeline-plugin-low",
          "fallback_low"
    ]
  }
}

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OVOS as a Solver Plugin

An advanced trick: ovos-core itself can act as a solver plugin. This allows you to expose OVOS itself as an agent to other applications in localhost

• 🐳 Good for chaining OVOS instances in docker.
• 🦾 Use skills in a collaborative AI / MoS (mixture-of-solvers) setup.
• ❌ ovos-bus-solver-plugin makes no sense inside a local persona (infinite loop!), but is great for standalone usage.
• 🌐 Expose OVOS behind HTTP api via ovos-persona-server without exposing the messagebus directly

{
  "name": "Open Voice OS",
  "solvers": [
    "ovos-solver-bus-plugin",
    "ovos-solver-failure-plugin"
  ],
  "ovos-solver-bus-plugin": {
    "autoconnect": true,
    "host": "127.0.0.1",
    "port": 8181
  }
}

💡 if you are looking to access OVOS remotely or expose it as a service see hivemind agents documentation for a more secure alternative

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Summary Table

Component	Role
Solver Plugin	Stateless text-to-text inference (e.g., Q&A, summarization).
Persona	Named agent composed of ordered solver plugins.
Persona Server	Expose personas to other Ollama/OpenAI compatible projects.
Persona Pipeline	Handles persona activation and routing inside OVOS core.

By decoupling solvers, personas, and persona management, OVOS allows for powerful, customizable AI experiences, adaptable to both voice and text interactions across platforms.