Mycroft was a free and open-source software virtual assistant that uses a natural language user interface.

[5] Unusually for a voice-controlled assistant, Mycroft did all of its processing locally, not on a cloud server belonging to the vendor.

[6] Inspiration for Mycroft came when Ryan Sipes and Joshua Montgomery were visiting a makerspace in Kansas City, MO, where they came across a simple and basic intelligent virtual assistant project.

Instead of being based on phoneme recognition, Precise uses a trained recurrent neural network to distinguish between sounds which are, and which aren't Wake Words.

Mycroft had partnered with Mozilla's Common Voice Project to leverage their DeepSpeech speech to text software.

[16] Mycroft uses an intent parser called Adapt to convert natural language into machine-readable data structures.

In February 2023, a post on the Kickstarter page announced that they "will not be able to fulfill any remaining Mark II rewards", however they "will still be shipping all orders that are made through the Mycroft website".

In May 2018, the company partnered with WorkAround, an impact sourcing provider who broker work opportunities for refugees, to undertake bulk machine learning training.