Welcome to Almost Here, Around the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.

Future Technologies is to transform our lives for better or worse or the focus of this podcast.

Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used.

Or just around the corner, for Bitcoin to artificial intelligence,

3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more.

Hello everyone and welcome to Future Tech Podcast. I'm your host

Juliet Lamar and joining us today is Joshua Montgomery. He is the

CEO at Mycroft AI. Welcome Joshua. Well thank you for having me I'm looking

for to it. Absolutely so why I do you go ahead and give our audience a overview of Mycroft AI and what you

guys are working on over there?

Yeah, Mycroft AI is the open source alternative to Alexa or Siri.

Our community and our company are building a voice assistant that's completely open and accessible to anyone from a student doing a STEM

project at a high school to a Fortune 10 company that's building a new technology

or a new vehicle. Wow, so I guess what drove you to start this?

You know, we have Siri, we have Google Voice, Alexa, all that, you know, what really sets you apart and what were some of the things

that you're hoping to fix with your product?

Yeah, so, you know, we were doing this before Google and Amazon made it cool.

Our project started in 2015 with a Kickstarter that successfully raised just over $100,000 and allowed us to start building a voice assistant for everyone.

And then shortly after that, Amazon did the Super Bowl ad for Echo,

and then a few months later, Google announced the Google Assistant project.

And so we've been here since the beginning.

And what drove us to do this was at the time we wanted to build Jarvis from Iron Man in our maker space and we went out and we went out to see what technology was available that would allow us to do that and of course you know Siri is locked up behind the the apple's

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