Welcome to the GitHub repositories of the Open Voice Interoperability Initiative! The Open Voice Interoperability Initiative is a project of the Linux Foundation AI and Data Foundation. It aims to revolutionize the conversational AI landscape by enabling voice and conversational AI systems to function like the web. Currently, conversational assistants operate in isolated walled gardens, confining users to a single proprietary ecosystem. The initiative proposes a future where users can seamlessly interact with any assistant or language model, just as they do now when navigating web pages.
Our approach involves defining, developing, and promoting standards, starting with an open, universal application messaging protocol or programming interface (API) called the Conversation Envelope. This API will allow assistants to interoperate across platforms, facilitating seamless communication and content transfer.
Our GitHub repositories are where you can find our specifications, documentation, and sample code.
Interoperability is crucial for user access, opportunity, and commercial freedom in the evolving conversational AI domain. Unlike the World Wide Web, where browsers allow users to freely access billions of web pages based on standardized protocols, conversational assistants currently operate in closed ecosystems. Interoperability among conversational assistants is inspired by the web's open ecosystem, allowing users to switch between assistants effortlessly and access diverse sources of information.
Standard message formats, such as the Conversation Envelope and Dialog Events, are being developed for conveying information between assistants that enables them to collaborate on addressing users' goals. These specifications can be found in the docs repository.
We advocate for developing interoperability protocols through an open, transparent, and participatory process. This involves collecting and analyzing case studies, publishing requirements and specifications for review, sharing work through webinars and demonstrations, maintaining a repository of documents and code, and encouraging developer involvement.
Open Voice Interoperability plans to address issues like the discovery and location of conversational agents and to address important security and privacy concerns. The roadmap also includes investigating how a universal API can simplify development and ensure consistency across services.
The initiative invites participation from developers, researchers, and organizations interested in shaping the future of conversational AI. Explore our sandbox software, comment on the specifications and most importantly, try out the specifications with your conversational assistants.
Please check out our project repositories, listed below, for information about our specifications, background documentation, our sandbox implementation, and other implementation examples.
For more information, see:
