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Voice Recognition for a Techie?
kaybee asks: "I am a long-time developer, sysadmin, and general computer junkie (for fun and for work) who needs to seriously curb the usage of his hands. I'm curious as to the current voice recognition options, preferably usable on Linux and Windows. I prefer the command-line to a GUI, I prefer Vim to anything else, and I still read my email with Pine. I'd like to hear options for sending email via voice, which I hope is easy, and I'd love to hear of any solutions that allow effective coding via voice, which seems much more difficult."
Seriously, if you're suffering hand or arm pain, you should think about the way you're doing things now. Speech recognition is unlikely to replace your current coding practices, although it might help with writing reports.
Instead, try using the keyboard break feature in gnome. To start with, have it kick you off your computer every 30 mins for a 3 min break, and don't allow yourself to postpone breaks. Get some equivalent software for windows too. Use your 3 min breaks to walk around and stretch. Within a week, you won't be a lot less productive, but your arms will feel a lot better. Then you can maybe up it to 40 mins. In the short term, a course of anti-inflams might help (ask your doctor).
Also, don't come home in the evening and play games on your computer, or do more work. Your arms probably can't take it. Equivalently, inform your employer of your condition and subsequent inability to work reckless overtime hours.
These two things should get you started for long-term sustainable maintenance of your arms.
It's been a while since I've had to look into speech recognition for linux, but this link should help you get started: Linux Accessibility Resource Site
Read down to the section about speech recognition. I hope that helps.
My inner self is ineffable, so don't eff with me.
For gaming on WinXP, I use an app called Shoot!. While playing Falcon, I use it for fairly simple (press T, wait 5 seconds, press 1) macros. I was dicking around and decided to set up a profile for some simple stuff in Cygwin. If I say "list", the program returns "ls". "List all" will return "ls -a". "List all long" will return "ls -la".
You can, with some tweaking, even get it to understand complicated stuff. If I say "manual g r u b", I can get "man grub". "Vi save quit" could be mapped to ":wq" without too much trouble.
Anything you can type, it can do.
I don't think it works under Linux. I don't know of anything like it under linux. It does, however, work quite well inside PuTTY.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
http://perlbox.sourceforge.net/
http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/
Command and control is a lot easier to do with voice recognition since the dictionary the engine has to choose from is so much smaller. Having voice recognition engines understand arbitrary words well is still a bit difficult.
I tied both Dragon Naturally Speaking (costing ~ $500 or $600 at the time), and gave up the training problems and low recognition rates. I tried IBM's ViaVoice Professional, USB-Pro -- with digital signal processing in an included microphone and a digital connection to my computer. With a 1 paragraph training session, it was already over 95% and improving over Draggin'. It was easier to train, and you could train it on the text you were typing -- i.e. it was able to learn from corrections and merge them back into your voice profile.
Unfortunately, IBM released it in 2001-2002, then forgot about it. They've since gone onto their non-training voice recognition solutions for sale to businesses. They seem to have advanced, but not in any retail product.
Dragon has come out with updates, but from people who have used and trained on *both*, ViaVoice has higher accuracy (~1% difference). The ViaVoice product price has fallen, and Dragon has, of course, gone up....
Whatever product you get, get a fast 2+CPU machine with lots of RAM - 2GB or more. The ViaVoice algorithm adapts to your talking speed -- it will perform more looks and comparisons and have greater accuracy as the processor speed goes up. ViaVoice stops comparing when it runs out of time (your speaking has gotten too far ahead). But it listens to the words, in context, to determine spelling. The more memory it has, the more vocabulary it can pull into memory. Note -- I am saying get a dual-cpu (or dual core) machine, the faster the better.
Viavoice was also released on Linux, but without as much application support.
For coding support in voice products -- there just hasn't been enough demand.
But for "wrist support" -- try a multi-faceted approach. Maybe voice recognition, maybe a tablet for input? Ergo keyboards, trackballs? It's not a comfy field. There isn't a great financial incentive to develop voice input for coding when you can hire foreigners for peanuts, and keep having eager generations of new hackers to come and be sacrificial lambs on the keyboards of progress...;-)