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Installing Skills

Most distributions of Neon Core will include some installed skills. It is recommended to specify additional skills as described below, or you can manually install a skill like any other Python package (i.e. pip install <skill-reference>).

<skill_reference> here is usually a package name, but may also be a git spec like git+https://github.com/neongeckocom/skill-about@dev.

OVOS Skills Manager (OSM) was previously recommended here but support has been deprecated. Please use the methods outlined in this document and update any skills as necessary to support installation.

Default Neon Skills

Many Neon skills are included by default and all of them should be installable via pip. Many of the skills can be installed from PyPI (i.e. pip install neon-skill-translation), and any containing setup.py can be installed from git (i.e. pip install git+https://github.com/NeonGeckoCom/skill-translation).

Configuring Extra Skills

The recommended method for adding non-default skills is to add them to your configuration. This will ensure that skills are updated and that they are re-installed after system updates. Extra skills can be added to configuration:

skills:
  default_skills:
    - git+https://github.com/NeonGeckoCom/skill-translation
    - neon-skill-translation~=1.0

Note that the skills here are Python packages. This is the same kind of string you would pass to pip install, including any (optional) version specs.

Installing Skills from GitHub

OSM installation is documented here, but not recommended. Skills should be updated to use pip installation, as described above.

There are many community skills published to GitHub that may be searched for and installed using OSM. Hints are available from the CLI via osm --help or osm install --help. Beware that not all skills are tested and skills installed from GitHub may not work, may be malicious, or may no longer be maintained. The skill lists below have generally been evaluated to some degree, but still be careful about running any code from the internet.

Other Considerations

Skill installation from git has the possibility of breaking Python dependencies. If you run into trouble after installing a skill, you may want to perform a factory reset to get back to a set of working Python packages.

Locating Installed Skills

Skills are generally installed to one of two locations, depending on whether they were installed as Python packages or cloned from Git.

Python Packages

For Python packaged skills, a skill is installed like any other Python package. You can find a list of all installed python packages with pip list and most skills should be listed with pip list | grep skill but it is up to a skill's author to choose a package name, so this is not guaranteed to list all skills.

Git Cloned Skills (Deprecated)

For skills installed from Git (usually using OSM), the default install location is ~/.local/share/neon/skills, but this may be configured in neon.yaml to any location. More detailed configuration documentation is available in the OVOS Docs.

Other Skill Indices

OpenVoiceOS Organization

There are several skills in the OpenVoiceOS organization that may be installed.

Mycroft Marketplace

There are also skills in the Mycroft Marketplace (note that there are more open Pull Requests there too).

Andlo's List

There is a list of Mycroft skills maintained by community member andlo on GitHub. Many of these will need to be updated for installation support.