Mycroft

Mycroft may refer to multiple things, most notably a fictional character in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and an open-source voice assistant project.

Mycroft Holmes is a fictional character who appears in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories as Sherlock Holmes's elder brother and a senior government official who operates largely from behind the scenes in Whitehall. In the canon, Mycroft is depicted as possessing extraordinary intellect and broad knowledge of national affairs, but he favors analysis over action and rarely takes the field. He appears in several stories, including The Greek Interpreter and The Bruce-Partington Plans, and is described as a member of the discreet Diogenes Club in London.

Mycroft AI is an open-source voice assistant project created by the company Mycroft AI, Inc. The project, launched via crowdfunding in 2015, aims to provide a privacy-respecting, fully open platform for voice interaction. Core components include Mycroft Core, the Precise wake word detector, the Padatious natural language understanding engine, and the Mimic text-to-speech system. The software runs on Linux-based systems, including Raspberry Pi, and supports hardware with images such as Picroft. Users can extend functionality with community-created skills and, in some cases, through a marketplace. Mycroft emphasizes transparency, user control over data, and interoperability with other services, offering an alternative to proprietary assistants.