Jovo v4.3: Polly TTS, MongoDB, NLU Performance

Published by Alex Swetlow & Jan König on Sep 7, 2022.

Jovo v4.3 builds on top of our major v4 release last year and includes many improvements, new integrations, and community plugins. Learn more below.

Since our v4.2 release, there were lots of core features added to the Jovo Framework, as well as integrations and plugins to the Jovo Marketplace, for example:

• TTS features to generate speech audio files from text output.
• MongoDB integration to store user data.
• Keyword NLU Plugin that allows you to skip NLU requests for certain keywords
• Sanity CMS integration for content management

Learn more about all additions below: New Integrations and Plugins.

v4.3 also comes with many smaller improvements and bugfixes. You can find all releases on GitHub and the Jovo News page.

A huge thank you for everyone who keeps helping to improve Jovo: Mark, Ben, Florian, Gianluca, David, Fabian, Itay, Joshua, Ruben, Program Productions, Tal, Stephane, Frank, Jorge and many more who are part of the Jovo community!

A variety of integrations and plugins was added to the Jovo Marketplace:

• TTS features to generate speech audio files from text output.
• Output plugins that help you craft, convert, and manage content
• Games plugins that help you build voice and chat games with Jovo
• MongoDB Integration to store user data
• Keyword NLU Plugin that allows you to skip NLU requests for certain keywords
• Community Tools plugin with helpful features for all types of Jovo projects
• TimeZone Plugin as a convenient way to retrieve the user's time zone across platforms
• VS Code Extension with snippets to speed up Jovo development

Thanks a lot to Mark, Joshua, Frank and Jorge for adding the community plugins and integrations!

A major new feature is the ability to turn text from your output templates into text to speech (TTS) audio files and even store them on a server or cloud provider. Learn more in the TTS documentation.

• Polly TTS to turn text into audio
• S3 Cache to store the audio on Amazon S3

Thanks a lot to Mark for adding this core feature and the integrations!

Jovo v4.3 also comes with integrations that help you prepare and manage output:

• Sanity CMS Integration to manage content in Sanity
• Spintax Plugin to use Spintax expressions in your output templates
• Jexl Plugin to use Jexl expressions in your output templates

Thanks a lot to Mark and Frank for adding these community plugins and integrations!

Thanks to Mark, there are now a variety of plugins that help you build games using Jovo:

• PlayFab Plugin to integrate your Jovo app with the PlayFab platform
• Player Generator Plugin to generate random player names and avatars for your users
• Badgerific Plugin to add badges and achievements to your games

This release does not come with any breaking changes. Happy upgrading!

There are several ways how you can get started with Jovo:

• Follow our getting started guide to install the Jovo CLI and create a new project
• Take a look at our examples
• Join our community

Thanks a lot for being part of Jovo!