 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Nicolo. Isn't that a very big issue regarding privacy? Like voice assistants, how they usually work is that they record your voice, most of them all of the time actually, and upon hearing some trigger phrase, they record what comes next, then send that to servers on somebody else's computer, simplifying it, process that there and then send back, you know, your answer. But that gives away your voice, your data, everything, it even requires a connection most of the time. So isn't that a problem? Now, of course, this is a bit of generalizing, different voice assistants will work in different ways. But there is actually a project for a voice assistant that is meant to be privacy enabled by default. And that project has very close ties to KDPLASM actually. And just to be clear, this is not a sponsored video or anything. I just, you know, liked the project. Okay, so what you're seeing right now is the Mark two, which is a product by Minecraft that is, you know, a little Google home. It's a bit pricey, as you can see, but it's reasonable when compared to some of the competition that you have at this price point. And the cool thing is that this little device runs KDPLASMA. Now, obviously, just look at the screen. That is not KDPLASMA desktop, but actually KDPLASMA comes in very different size and form factors. You have plasma mobile for mobile phones. And there's another project which is called KDPLASMA Nano, which aims to implement a very bare bone structure that can be used in even Internet of Things kind of devices, such as, you know, the Mark two. So the Mark two runs this KDPLASMA Nano, if I'm not mistaken, I could be, but that's how I recall it. Does it mean though that that's the only place where Microsoft runs? Because again, it could be interesting to have at least one voice assistant that is private by default, which means that everything happens offline on your computer. Nothing, nothing is sent to Microsoft itself. I have tried the project. It has some cool concepts as services. You can add some, you can remove some. It is a cool project. So do we have to spend 350 to actually get it? And yes, we'll be happy to have a KDPLASMA device in our houses, but we already run KDPLASMA on your desktop maybe. So can we get it there? So since 2017, Microsoft has a plasmoid. That is a little component that you can add to your KDPLASMA desktop to actually use Microsoft. Microsoft, I obviously meant Microsoft on your KDPLASMA desktop isn't that cool. So how it works is that you do install my craft. That is actually a slightly complex part of the task that took me some time the first time I tried it. And then you install the plasmoid, which has its own repository. And then you just add that to your plasma panel, as an example, or on your desktop. And it has a button to, you know, talk to it. But you can also just type your queries, which could be more interesting on a desktop form factor. So not not only you can buy, you know, the that mark device, mark two device, which is running KDPLASMA to try Microsoft, but you can also try it directly on your desktop. But that's actually not about it because KDPLASMA, as I said, comes in various different sizes and forms. And there are other form factors that could be more interesting for a voice assistant point of view. As an example, you usually don't want to have a voice assistant on your desktop. That's usually not the use case. However, on your phone, it's much different. Usually it's more difficult or it takes more time to interact with elements on your phone. So it might be just easier to tell the phone, bring me home to just run up Google Maps or whatever you use with the route to home already there. That would be cool to also have in the Linux world, I think. And Microsoft tries to offer that. But can you actually run that on your phone? And as always with Linux on mobile phones, keep in mind that we are not currently in a super ready, everything is great status right now. There's still work going on on this kind of things. But of course, there's somebody who already tried to do that. So this is Mike Stone, which is mostly the lonely house of Mike being in his ideological purity at the moon. That was tough sentence to say. Thank you. And the thing is that he tried to actually use Microsoft on the phone. And there's all the nice article, you know, actually explaining how it works in dimensions. The fact that Mark two dev kits are shipping Mark two is the device that I showed you before. And then it says like, can we actually try to use the pine phone to interact with the mark two, especially because the price point of the pine phone is much lower compared to the mark two. So he tried to do that explains how it goes about it. And then eventually it tries to ask a question using the command line interface. And the question was how is the weather and the answer is it's currently clear sky and 62 degrees, which is a terrible weather for our Celsius people. But I guess that for Fahrenheit, that's pretty good, right? Like 62 degrees. If that was Celsius, why aren't you all using Celsius anyway? Anyway, anyway, this was done using the command line interface, as I said, but it seems like the microphone was actually running. So what he tried to do is take the pine phone, you went to another room which had no Microsoft devices in it, because he was also the is also the owner of a Mark one. And he tried to ask, what time is it to the pine phone? And the pine phone promptly replied with the correct time, which thankfully is standard. Otherwise, it would be like, is the 40 hour 40 hour of the day. I don't know what he is in America to count time. I don't know at this point. So it actually works. And this is extremely important because a voice assistant makes sense for a device like the pine phone. And the pine phone is much cheaper compared to the Mark two. So great news. So okay, what other form factors could benefit from from somebody, something like the Microsoft voice assistant. And the other use case that you can see going around if you're into this sort of things is TV is like controlling a TV, you've probably seen those like Apple remote for Apple TV that has Siri on it. And really, that's the same idea on the Katie plasma world too. We do have plasma big screen. What is plasma big screen? It is Katie plasma again, but designed so that it makes sense to put that into a television and then only control it through a remote. So you just grab your remote, put a plasma big screen maybe on a Raspberry Pi, connect that to your big television. And then you have a smart TV without having to go out and buy like all TV stuff, I guess I've never had Apple TV. So does that work? Well, actually, plasma big screen, as I was saying, was designed from the very beginning with the idea to have Minecraft inside of it. So whenever you actually try to use it, you do have an icon in the top panel, roughly here usually, that is the Minecraft icon and that you can use to actually give some voice comments. This actually shows up in my testing even if you do not have Minecraft installed, but of course, you do need it to run. And it's even immediately displayed into the making full use of open source Minecraft AI into the main webpage about plasma big screen. In fact, this is the blog post that announced plasma big screen for the very first time by Marco Marti. And it immediately says plasma big screen is a platform intended on smart to use on smart TVs with a big remote friendly UI controls and voice activation. What technology did we use for it? Plasma, of course, and Minecraft. Again, this was very much designed for Minecraft. They offered the so-called skills and each skill takes care of a particular voice interaction. And the cool thing is that you can even add your own skills, which means that it should be easy to allow for interaction with the plasma interface just by adding some skills. In theory, there would be a cool, you know, video that showcased the Minecraft integration, but apparently it removed YouTube term of service. I guess that, I don't know, maybe Marco showcased playing a YouTube video using Minecraft and that YouTube video was under copyright. I don't know. What, what happened there? Hello, YouTube. But as I was saying, even from the very beginning, there were some skills, some pre-installed, some from the KD store, fully show voice controls. In particular, a YouTube client skill, which is perfectly usable both from a remote control and voice only. This is how it looks like. Interesting that the KD Plasma big screen announcement has as its highlighted video introducing GNOME 3.36. Nice reference there. Finally, if you were wondering, this is the GitLab repository that contains the Plasma Minecraft applet. It hasn't changed much in the last two years, unless I'm out of the loop, but it should still work. This, which is a blog post from Ubuntu Ubuntu log, sorry, showcase how the applet looks because, yeah, actually setting up the voice control both on, you know, KD Plasma desktop and I've found even on Plasma big screen takes a little bit of time, time, sorry, and tries. So if you're interested in exploring more of this kind of opportunity, then feel free to say, and I will go into that direction. But for now, this is a showcase of what technology do we currently have as an open source voice, voice control for KD Plasma, of course, but also any other desktop. I believe that there's also a widget for GNOME, but I'm not 100% sure I was obviously more focused on KD Plasma. So with that, it works on the desktop, it works on the pine phone, it works on TVS, it works pretty much anywhere. And it has its own little device, the mark shoe that you can buy. And even that one runs with KD inside of it. So isn't that pretty cool? Or is it? Are you interested about this? Because to be honest, I think that this is super cool, but it's not the kind of project that I would personally use. And maybe we come with a bit of a privacy oriented mentality that prevents us from this kind of project. So please tell me that I'm wrong. Would you use a project like this? And will you use a project like this? Because that's really the only way to make sure that it will have a nice feature. So thanks for following and as always, see you tomorrow with yet another episode.