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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."
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you said voice recognition for a Trekkie....
Tibbon
tibbon.com
No, computer, I said, "awk single quote left curly print dollar one right curly single quote file dot txt pipe sort pipe uniq dash see greater than a dot out"
shudder
[...]who needs to seriously curb the usage of his hands.
Lest they... *ahem* wander.
The main issue I see with coding by voice is that each character needs to be said by a word. We only have 26 single sounds we can make (at least us english speakers) and so pretty much everything besides the basic sounds have to be the result of multiple letters strung together. Here's some math:
Lets say you type at about 40wpm, or about 160characters per minute (this is a low estimate of 4 chars per word), or about 2.5 characters per second.
To be as productive speaking, you'd probabily have to speak about the same number of words per second as you type characters, or 2.5 words. That's really fast.
Sorry bub, doesn't look speech is a very good alternative. Hell, Brain Implants on the other hand...
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.
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.