“I invested in Mycroft's early seed rounds for two reasons: 1) Voice AI struck me as an inevitability, given the trend of computer interfaces becoming increasingly natural and intuitive; 2) I couldn't accept a world in which we let Big Tech get a stranglehold on Voice (given their track record of using smart speakers to push ads on us, spy on us, sell our private information, and generally violate our privacy).”

    -Rob Ness

Privacy is priceless. 

Invest in the voice assistant that respects that privacy. 

If you'd like to receive our weekly newsletters which contain hardware, software, and business development updates, sign up at https://mycroft.ai/newsletters/

You can now invest in startups with a self-directed IRA. 

Peter Thiel, of Paypal mafia fame, was an early investor in Facebook. Using a self-directed Roth IRA, he was able to grow that investment in a staggering way. Fast forward twenty years, and Propublica refers to Thiel as “Lord of the Roths” with holdings in the BILLIONS within his Roth alone. 

We’ll put additional commentary aside on the unfair reality of wealth inequality and get to the point: ANYONE can do this through the SEC’s democratization of equity crowdfunding. The steps are simple:

1.  Open a self-directed IRA with a platform like ALTO or Equity Trust. Both are simple platforms that are made for using one’s IRA to invest in startups, buy crypto, or purchase other assets beyond the traditional options. Additionally, help is available on both sites via help@altoira.com (ALTO) or NewAccountsETC@trustetc.com (Equity Trust). 

2. After transferring funds from your existing IRA to your self-directed IRA with a platform like ALTO or Equity Trust, log in to https://www.startengine.com/mycroftai, and click 

3. Input contact information, investment amount, etc. and check the box stating “I want to invest as a non-person legal entity such as a company, trust, or self-directed IRA."

Note: Investing with traditional IRAs uses your pre-tax assets while investing with Roth IRAs uses after-tax assets. 

Because investing is a long-term strategy, and IRAs are essentially a savings account, the two go hand-in-hand in making your finances work for you. While Mycroft would never promise a return, the potential behind investing in voice technology at a time when the market is booming is worth getting excited about.

Invest in Mycroft and yourself today.

If you'd like to receive our weekly newsletters which contain hardware, software, and business development updates, sign up at https://mycroft.ai/newsletters/

SpaceX’s Starlink team has recently started launching low orbiting satellites 60 at a time.  In fact, on January 6th 2020 SpaceX became the largest satellite operator in the world.  The system the SpaceX team is building will be able to deliver ultra-high-speed broadband at extremely low latency….globally.

But there is a privacy risk in having all of those low orbiting, high bandwidth satellites up there:  those satellites could become a global version of Gorgon Stare.

What is Gorgon Stare? Head to our blog to find out.

Privacy matters. Invest in yours today.

If you'd like to receive our weekly newsletters which contain hardware, software, and business development updates, sign up at https://mycroft.ai/newsletters/

“The world needs an open voice assistant as an alternative to the platforms controlled by the large tech corporations.”

    -Albert Wenger

If you’re not paying for the product, you ARE the product. Our investors are individuals who believe in Mycroft’s roadmap to bring the world an Open Source Voice Assistant that doesn’t require the Big Brother element. 

Privacy matters. Support Mycroft. 

If you'd like to receive our weekly newsletters which contain hardware, software, and business development updates, sign up at https://mycroft.ai/newsletters/

Mycroft has signed an agreement with Aztech, an $800 Million company, to manufacture Mycroft’s smart speaker on a global scale. 

This will enable the company to fulfill the more than $1M in preorders for the Mark II. 

As always, thank you for your interest in Mycroft. 

NOW is the time to invest in THE private voice assistant.

If you would like to receive regular Mycroft updates in your inbox, you can use our SMS feature to join now.

Text 'Mycroft Updates' to (773) 770-4377 

Do you <3 the 90s? 

In 1997, a little company based out of a garage in Seattle decided to sell books via mail. Do we need to explain further about who we’re talking about? Actually, there were a lot of those garage people...

In 24 years, that company became the juggernaut of snail mail. Ironic that one of the slowest methods of travel is what enabled Jeff Bezos to ride on one of the fastest rockets known to mankind? Your choice.

During their garage band days, investors could have bought equity in Amazon for $18 per share at the company’s IPO. One famous example states that an individual who invested $10,000 in 1997, would have holdings valued at $12 Million today. 

Mycroft is offering the chance to invest in a technology that is being adopted at a rate faster than the iPhone. Now is the time to take guided risk. To those who have already invested, we hope to cheers you on our solar-powered yachts in 24 years. 

According to Statista, the “number of digital voice assistants in use worldwide was expected to nearly double between 2019 and 2022, reaching 6.41 billion units by 2022.” 

Mycroft addresses the 41% of the population that is concerned with their privacy when it comes to those digital assistants. The software is private, open sourced, and customizable.

Thank you for supporting Mycroft. We plan to do right by you and the rest of the world by bringing an alternative to Big Brother. 

We had the pleasure of chatting with Eric Berry, Richard Littauer, and Alyssa Wright at Sustain, a podcast whose focus is “[bringing] together practitioners, sustainers, funders, researchers and maintainers of the open source ecosystem.” While open source is our homeland, many may not fully understand what it actually means. 

By definition, open source is information that is publicly accessible and modifiable. Internet engines like Mozilla, encyclopedias like Wikipedia, educational affiliations like Creative Commons, even textbooks can be open source.  When a software is open source, like Mycroft, it means that the public is able to access, modify, improve, and geekify the contents therein.

At Mycroft, we believe the idiom, “there’s always room for better.” 

Thank you for helping us to improve whenever and wherever we can. 

Friday September 10th, 2021

Mycroft’s founder, Joshua Montgomery, was the recent guest on the Homelab Podcast with hosts Tom Lawrence of Lawrence Systems and Jay LaCroix of Learn Linux TV. First, we’d like to thank Tom and Jay for having Josh on the show! The conversation was easy and right up everyone’s alley. The trio discussed privacy in the face of Big Tech as well as Mycroft’s fight against Patent Assertion Entities (Patent Trolls for short). We’ll leave the rest of the nitty gritty details about the show for your viewing pleasure. 

    If any of our followers have podcasts, YouTube channels, blogs, or other outlets of their own, and would like to discuss privacy, technology, startup investment, and/or entrepreneurship with Josh, feel free to email us at social@mycroft.ai. We’d be honored to continue the conversation and get the word out about privacy concerns. 

Wednesday September 8th, 2021

Improving the brains of Mycroft’s operating system is continuous. Our open source software allows for our community to make improvements in addition to those of our Developer Team.

Because of this ongoing effort, the software that drives Mycroft is consistently being improved. Here is a highlight of some of the changes since our last crowdfunding raise. Please click through to the linked blogs to learn more about each individual program. 

• Mycroft-GUI Framework

• Selene backend

• Common Query and IoT Frameworks

• Lingua Franca

• Voight Kampff test suite

• Plugin system for STT, TTS, Wake Word and Audio backend services

• Skill API

• Infrastructure Service Monitoring (blog post coming soon)

• New wake word more sensitive to non American males (blog post coming soon)

Each of these systems was an exceptional undertaking and are critical to providing the integrated, intuitive experience that you would expect from a consumer grade voice assistant. We’ve talked about a few of these in the past, but will be expanding on their development in future blog posts.

Thank you, as always, for your interest and support in Mycroft AI. 

Before you set out to enjoy your hopefully Laborless Weekend, we’d like to share a quote from one of our investors whose expertise has allowed him the privilege of putting financial fuel into promising opportunities:

“There are several large corporations that offer voice command interfaces to facilitate electronic features.  However, the privacy aspect is very concerning for many industries, including hospitals, government agencies and many more.  These segments of the market are virtually untapped and provide for a large opportunity for investment and development.  I believe that Mycroft provides a solution that is unique in the marketplace with an open source platform that can be adapted to a wide range of voice interface applications and is well posed to take advantage of that market space as it begins to burgeon.”

Richard E. Pickering

Harvard MBA

Entrepreneur with 28 US Patents

Wishing you all a happy, safe, and restful Labor Day Weekend. See you on Tuesday!

Mycroft Founder Joshua Montgomery recently hopped on a live chat on Youtube to give a brief update for the company and to respond to some commonly asked questions about Mycroft's manufacturing, operations, and development.

Check it out if you are interested and feel free to leave a comment so that we can respond to any other questions, comments, concerns in future live events. 

Lastly, don't forget to follow the channel to be notified of those future lives as well as the regular dev sync updates.

Guess what!?

The second round and last batch of Mark II Dev Kits (NOT to be confused with Mark II production units) have shipped! The Dev Kits are build-it-yourself and were geared toward our more tech-savvy crowd. 

These are extremely exciting times here as the Dev Kits give us a chance to have all of our early supporters test out our beta release software on development hardware, in the wild.

We are one step closer to production and will be keeping everyone abreast of our road to mass production. In the meantime, check out Duane's Product and Manufacturing Update here.

[The following is an automated notice from the StartEngine team].

Hello!

As you might know, Mycroft AI, Inc. has exceeded its minimum funding goal. When a company reaches its minimum on StartEngine, it's about to begin withdrawing funds. If you invested in Mycroft AI, Inc. be on the lookout for an email that describes more about the disbursement process.

This campaign will continue to accept investments until its indicated closing date.

Thanks for funding the future.

-StartEngine

We’ve been so happy to see our community growing since the start of our crowdfunding raise that it’s all we’ve talked about. Creating a voice technology/software is complex to say the least. We want to share with our investing community a little more about Mycroft as a company. 

Part of Mycroft’s software development consists of using Lingua Franca “- our multilingual parsing and formatting library.”  (Gesling, 2021, para. 1). Writing and architecting code can be a complex grey area in referencing existing language with original content. Add a dollop of open source and you can have a recipe for confusion. How does one “own” a language (re: code) that is based on other languages?

Our Director of Developer Relations, Kris Gesling, has written a fascinating piece on the notion of licensing a language and how Mycroft honors the law - no matter how ridiculous it may seem. Check it out here.

Reference

Gesling, K. (2021). Licensing a Language: How the copyright system abuses fundamental human rights. https://mycroft.ai/blog/licensing-a-language-how-the-copyright-system-abuses-fundamental-human-rights/

In this campaign Mycroft AI has 200 investors/new community members! In growing our community, we see the  demonstrable need and desire for a privacy-focused voice technology. By joining the over 1400 previous Reg CF investors, it is clear that Mycroft is favored to deliver a smart speaker capable of operating without making the customer the product. 

We are grateful to our new and returning investors. You see the need for a private alternative to Big Tech.

All good things come in 3’s. 

Like 3% bonus shares. 

We just passed the $300,000 in investments milestone. That must mean that our community knows a good thing when they see it. With the support from our previous backers and the objectifiable growth of our incoming community, it is apparent now more than ever that the world wants to control their privacy. 

Mycroft plans to deliver on that want. Thank you to those who have already invested!

For those who are tracking our progress, 3% bonus shares ends Monday, the 9th at 0600 ET. 

We just surpassed a quarter of our entire raise from 2018 in one week. $250,000!! We are over the moon, that harsh mistress, ( re: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein).

Thank you all for recognizing the progress Mycroft has made over the last couple of years and for your support in helping us bring a private voice assistant to market. 

Don’t forget about the 3% bonus shares for early bird investors. You know you want them.

We are honored to have over 100 investors join us within the first 72 hours of our raise to help us surpass our first $150,000 milestone. Thank you.

For any other early investors interested in taking advantage of our offering, there are early bird perks still available. Invest now and receive a bonus as our thank you for leading the way.