Backend Services

OVOS supports connecting devices to a backend, allowing you to manage multiple OVOS devices from a single location

Developers do not need to worry about backend details in their applications and skills

You can interact with the backends in your applications with ovos-backend-client

Identity Information

A unique uuid and pairing information generated by registering with Home is stored in: ~/.config/mycroft/identity/identity2.json <-- DO NOT SHARE THIS WITH OTHERS!

This file uniquely identifies your device and should be kept safe

Backend Options

  • Personal backend - self hosted
  • Selene - https://api.mycroft.ai (Deprecated - Selene is dead since February 2024)
  • Offline - support for setting your own api keys and query services directly
API Offline Personal Selene
Admin yes [1] yes no
Device yes yes yes
Metrics yes yes yes
Dataset yes yes yes
OAuth yes yes yes
Wolfram yes [2] yes yes
Geolocate yes yes yes
STT yes [2] yes yes
Weather yes [2] yes yes
Email yes [2] yes yes
[1] will update user level mycroft.conf
[2] needs additional configuration (eg. credentials)

Offline Backend

OVOS by default runs without a backend, in this case you will need to configure api keys manually

by default the configuration uses the offline backend

{
  "server": {
    "backend_type": "offline"
  }
}

Personal Backend

Personal backend is a reverse engineered alternative to selene that predates it

It provides the same functionality for devices and packs some extra options

It is not intended to serve different users or thousands of devices, there are no user accounts!

This is currently the only way to run a vanilla mycroft-core device offline

edit your configuration to use your own personal backend instance

{
  "server": {
    "backend_type": "personal",
    "url": "http://0.0.0.0:6712",
    "version": "v1",
    "update": true,
    "metrics": true,
    "sync_skill_settings": true
  }
}

source code

Selene

The official mycroft home backend is called selene, users need to create an account and pair devices with the mycroft servers.

With Mycroft's demise selene finally went down on February 2024

Support for selene was fully removed during ovos-core version 0.0.8

Selene is AGPL licensed: