Sherlock Holmes is a government official. Mycroft has a unique civil service position as a kind of human database for all aspects of government policy. He lacks Sherlock's interest in physical investigation, however, preferring to spend his time at the Diogenes Club. Holmes says that he first developed his methods of deduction as an undergraduate; his earliest cases, which he pursued as an amateur, came from fellow university students. A meeting with a classmate's father led him to adopt detection as a profession, and he spent several years after university as a consultant before financial difficulties led him to accept John H.
Mycroft (software) parsing by matching specific keywords in an order within an utterance. They also have a parser, "Padatious". Padatious, in contrast, uses example-based inference to determine intent. For speech synthesis Mycroft uses Mimic, which is based on the Festival Lite speech synthesis system. Mycroft is designed to be modular, so users are able to change its components. For example, espeak can be used instead of Mimic. The Mycroft project is also working on and selling smart speakers that run its software. All of its hardware is open-source, released under the CERN Open Hardware Licence. Its first hardware project was the Mark