Ackren · Gathered
Domain packs, gathered
Competence ships as a pack: authored, listed and checkable, gathered in Quire before it ships.
What a pack is
Authored, not trained
A pack is domain competence: lexicon entries, qualia relations, frames and rules for a bounded subject. Every entity in it was written by a person and can be listed, inspected and argued with. Nothing in a pack is inferred from a corpus and left unexamined.
It is not called a skill. Skill is Amazon’s Alexa term of art and it imports the wrong picture, a sandboxed bolt-on rather than an authored extension of the grammar. The human-facing word is voice.
Orthogonality
Format and pack do not interact
Any pack runs on any format, subject only to flash. Format names the hardware floor and pack names the competence, and the two axes never merge. The moment a deck implies otherwise, the capability ladder is back and the argument we are making has been given away.
Conversation is the base engine rather than a pack. Layers one and two of speech act recognition, and a thinner layer three, come with the engine as a mathematical consequence rather than as a product decision.
Authorship is a research problem
Long-form authorship is not a forthcoming pack and will not appear on a roadmap as one. Nothing in an n-gram distribution holds an argument together across paragraphs. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a schedule they cannot keep.