Almond is a programmable virtual assistant, that is, every command that the user issues is translated into a programming language, called ThingTalk and then executed. ThingTalk is a declarative domain-specific language we specifically developed for the Internet of Things. It provides a higher level abstraction for connecting things, while hiding the details of configuration and networking.
A ThingTalk program has a simple construct: stream => query => action;:
it combines a stream, a query (optional), and an action in order, and terminates by a semicolon.
The stream determines when the rest of the program runs,
the query retrieves data, and the action shows the data to the user
or invokes an action function defined in Thingpedia.
Here is an example of ThingTalk program which gets a cat picture and shows it to the user:
now => @com.thecatapi.get() => notify;
In this example, the stream is just now, which means the program will run once immediately.
The query invokes the get function from The Cat API
which returns a random cat picture.
The action is notify, which will show the cat picture to the user.
You can issue commands in ThingTalk directly in My Almond.
To tell the system that your input is code and not a natural language sentence,
type \t with a space before the ThingTalk code.
In the previous example, you have seen one example of stream, now, which fires once immediately.
In addition to now, ThingTalk allows a program to stay active in the background and trigger the rest of the program
at a future time when a certain condition is met.
The supported stream types include monitor stream and timer.
Query functions in Thingpedia can be monitored and turned into a stream, called monitor stream. A monitor stream will trigger the rest of the program once the returned data from the query changes.
For example, one can set up a monitor for Fox News with the following command
monitor @com.foxnews.get() => notify;
This program starts a monitor on get query function
from Fox news
produces a notification to the user every time Fox News publishes something new.
Note that in this example, there is no query part. When the monitor gets triggered,
it also passes the information directly to the action notify.
In addition to operating on changes of data, programs can be fired at specific times using timer streams, using the syntax:
timer(base=makeDate(), interval=1h) => @com.thecatapi.get() => notify;
This syntax creates a timer that starts now (makeDate() with no parameter is the current
time) and fires every hour.
Another form of timer triggers every day at a specific time:
attimer(time=makeTime(8, 0)) => @com.thecatapi.get() => notify;
This syntax creates a timer that triggers every day at 8 AM.
For the precise syntax of timers, see the ThingTalk reference.
In our first example, we have seen a query @com.thecatapi.get().
It talks to the Cat API and gets a random cat picture from it.
The query in a program provides data for the action to consume. Note that if the program also contains a monitor stream, both the data from the stream and query will be available to use in the action.
After a program is triggered and the data is retrieved, the program will run an action.
notify is the default action which shows the data from the stream and the query to the user.
Besides notify, the action part can also invoke any action function in Thingpedia.
For example, instead of being notified inside Almond, you can choose to send the information
to Slack as follows:
monitor @com.foxnews.get() => @com.slack.send();
So far, we have not used any parameters for functions in our examples. In the following we will introduce how to handle parameters in ThingTalk.
Parameters in ThingTalk are passed by keyword, using the names of the parameters defined in Thingpedia.
now => @com.thecatapi.get(count=3) => notify;
The get function for @com.thecatapi has an optional input parameter count.
In this example, we set count=3 so we can get 3 cat pictures. (Who doesn't like more cats?)
In addition to constant values, we can also pass the value returned by previous functions, by specifying the name of one output parameter of the previous function.
monitor @com.foxnews.get() => @com.slack.send(channel="general", message=title);
In this example, the message sent to slack is the value of the output parameter title from Fox News.
What if the user does not want to be notified of all news articles, but only of those related to a specific topic? This can be accomplished using a filter:
monitor (@com.foxnews.get(), title =~ "Stanford") => notify;
The filter is specified with a comma following the corresponding stream or query, followed
by a boolean predicate that uses the output parameters.
In this example, we filter on the title parameter; the program will be triggered only if
the title of the article contains (denoted by =~) the word "Stanford".
Multiple filters can be combined with && (and) and || (or):
monitor @com.foxnews.get(), title =~ "Stanford" || title =~ "Almond" => notify;
For the full list of predicates supported by ThingTalk, see the ThingTalk reference.
So far, we only introduced full programs, composed of a stream (possibly now), a query, and an action
(possibly notify). These programs are complete and not composable.
We can instead split each part of a program into a composable part using the following declaration syntax:
query (count : Number) := @com.thecatapi.get(count=count);
stream (keyword : String) := monitor @com.foxnews.get(), title =~ keyword;
Code snippets are used to provide composable examples for devices in Thingpedia, as detailed in their guide.
A query can be combined with another query to form a join, which reads from two sources of data at the same time:
now => @com.foxnews.get() join @com.yandex.translate.translate(target_language="ch") on (text=title) => notify;
In this case, each news from Fox News is combined with the translate query from
Yandex Translate,
using text=title as the join condition.
In practice, this program means that get the title of news from Fox News, translate it
to Chinese, and show the translated title to the user.
A monitor stream can also work with a joined query:
monitor (@com.foxnews.get() join @com.bing.web_search() on (query=title)) => notify;
In that case, Almond will monitor the join of the two queries, that is, it will continuously query Bing based on the news title and notify if the search results change.
Note that the semantics of this command is different from the following one:
monitor @com.foxnews.get() => @com.bing.web_search(query=title) => notify;
Instead of monitoring changes of the search results, this program only monitors the changes on Fox News, and then runs the Bing search if it detects a new article.
In addition to now, timer, and monitor stream, ThingTalk also supports edge_monitor.
Two types of edge streams exist: edge on new streams, and edge filter streams.
An edge on new stream filters the stream to contain only data that was not previously present in the stream. This is very similar to a monitor stream. It can be useful when combined with timers to have customized polling interval:
edge (timer(base=makeDate(), interval=1min) join @com.foxnews.get()) on new => notify;
This program will look at the Fox News every minute (rather than 1 hour, which is
the default interval for @com.foxnews.get), and notify users on new news.
An edge filter allows users specifying richer conditions than "the value differs". When it's used, the program is only evaluated if the filter was previously false and is now true.
Consider the two examples:
edge (monitor @thermostat.get_temperature()) on value >= 70F => notify;
monitor @thermostat.get_temperature(), value >= 70F => notify;
In the first case, an edge filter is used: the user receives only one notification, as the thermostat crosses from below 70 Fahrenheit to above. In the second case, once the temperature is above 70, any fluctuation will result in a new notification, which is potentially unwanted. For this reason, it is more common to use edge filters rather than regular filters with numeric values.