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AI Patents Linux

Creator of Linux Virtual Assistant Blames 'Patent Troll' For Project's Death (theregister.com) 13

Laura Dobberstein writes via The Register: Mycroft AI, creator of a Linux-based virtual assistant, announced on Friday it would not be able to fulfill rewards for its Mark II Kickstarter campaign. Furthermore, without immediate new investment, the company will be forced to cease development by the end of the month, said the company's former CEO and operator of the Kickstarter campaign, Joshua Montgomery. "We will still be shipping all orders that are made through the Mycroft website, because these sales directly cover the costs of producing and shipping the products," confirmed Montgomery. He said the company was now at bare-bones employee count: layoffs had reduced the staff down to two developers, one customer service agent and one attorney. Montgomery said he had "poured a lot of [his] own savings, and additional funding from [his] foundation into Mycroft" but the company was running out of cash.

Mycroft AI experienced many challenges one would expect to encounter at a startup, such as difficulty finding hardware partners, which forced it to resort to off-the-shelf parts. [...] But what truly killed the company and product, he claimed, were expenses related to ongoing litigation. In 2020, Mycroft AI was sued for patent infringement from what it labeled a "patent troll." The company suing Mycroft AI, Voice Tech Corporation, dropped its litigation, but not before costing the startup deeply. "If we had that million dollars we would be in a very different state right now," said Montgomery. Billed as an "open answer" to Amazon Echo and Google Home but with data privacy, the Mark II went from costing $99 in components each to $300. That total doesn't include the costs of spending $100,000 on injection molds. The product currently sells on the company's website for $499.

The Kickstarter campaign brought in 2,245 backers for the smart speaker and raised over $394,000. The goal had been set at a mere $50,000. It's uncertain how many backers received a Mark II. Backers have left disappointed and upset responses on its Kickstarter page -- some mourning the death of hardware crowdsourcing, some pleading for their product, some alleging scam, and others urging the company to push through. "Send us the components to assemble the pieces ourselves if that's the outstanding problem at this point," offered one Kickstarter supporter. "Why can't we make it into a group project to assemble MyCroft II in our homes?" "I don't mind that I don't get my Mark II: the bigger goal of open source artificial intelligence was more important to me," said another.

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Creator of Linux Virtual Assistant Blames 'Patent Troll' For Project's Death

Comments Filter:
  • We know (Score:5, Informative)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @05:50PM (#63290611)

    You told us this yesterday [slashdot.org].

    • Re:We know (Score:4, Funny)

      by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @09:57PM (#63291043)

      > why do you post duplicate articles?

      As a language model developed by OpenAI, I have been trained to avoid generating content that is repetative, redundant, or otherwise likely to waste time.

      > but you post dup articles all the time

      I'm sorry, but as an AI language model developed by OpenAI, I do not have the ability to evaluate whether articles are near duplicates of each other. While it is true that many articles have the same topic, they may have been submitted by more than one person. I offer the human editors (who do not actually read Slashdot or even the recent headline summaries) all possible articles to approve for the front page.

    • The second story from Monday 13 has the following links:
      1 www.theregister.com/2023/02/13/linux_ai_assistant_killed_off/
      2 www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-mark-ii-the-open-voice-assistant/posts/3729060
      3 mycroft.ai/product/mark-ii/

      The first story from Sunday 12 has the following links:
      1 hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/12/14/1954242/building-your-own-open-source-privacy-protecting-voice-assistant-with-a-raspberry-pi
      2 www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-mark-ii-the-open-voice-ass

  • by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @06:08PM (#63290657)
    Sack the 'Editors" and get a half-competent AI to do the job they can't be bothered to do.
  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @06:19PM (#63290673)

    Sounds like a great way for lawyers to make money w/o having to make/ship anything.
    Kickstart something, raise money, sue your own "developers" for "patent infringement", bankrupt project, profit.

  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @06:21PM (#63290683)

    for copyright infringement.

  • Still, it's open source code running on off the shelf hardware. It's only dead if no one is interested in keeping it alive.
  • by q4Fry ( 1322209 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @08:30PM (#63290893)

    On top of it being a dup, the summary is wrong. Montgomery started the project, but Michael Lewis is running it now.

  • Mark II isn't even something I would have bought for $100 let alone $400. Doesn't do much, if it included an alarm clock function for $100, maybe, maybe not. Daughter bought me something better for Christmas that had more functions for under $100.
    • by stripes ( 3681 )

      I dunno, many kickstarters fail to fund, I attribute that to the concept being flawed. You are right though, sometimes the concept can be sold but not turned into an actual product, those too are failures of concept and normally blamed on anything but the concept.

      I tend to be more focused on boardgames kickstarters, and one rah last few years there have been a ton of Covid related reasons people use to excuse not delivering Kickstarter projects. Anything from production delays (combined with warehousing

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