Perl scripting using Vista's speach recognition! Awesome!

[Hirudin]

WOW™ I didn't even know this was built into every Vista machine!

[jgpaiva]

Although that is definitelly a faliure in terms of speech recognition aimed at programming, i actually find that impressive!
They way it deletes words, corrects words and such is very impressive!
Also, it can recognize "normal" text very well. I look forward to using this myself

[Lashiec]

Not to spoil the party, but to those who can, try the speech recognition in Vista to see how far it is from science fiction concepts. Could be a side effect of a poor implementation, so probably the experience with ViaVoice or Dragon Naturally Speaking is far better.

Anyway, the predictions of death for the mouse+keyboard combo are greatly exaggerated. Controlling a computer via speech is the slowest thing I saw since I tried to work with 20 tabs open in Firefox. Really, it transforms a brand new computer in a Spectrum. That said, it's pretty cool

[Laughing Man]

There is something I wanted to do with speech recognition though. Controlling media players. I use my laptop in my car for navigation sometimes. But it'd be nice if I could say.. "Play Music" or "Play Muse" and it would play whatever music I have in a playlist..

Haven't figured that out yet though. Next idea for a donation coder project? haha..

[Lashiec]

That reminds me of the most hilarious phase during our test (me and some friends) of the speech capabilities of Vista. We wanted to control Windows Media Player, and everything was going well, until we tried to "Pause" the song. I'll tell you, it was simply impossible. We tried every single pronunciation of the word, and everytime we tried, WMP closed itself. And according to the PC owner, in Spanish it was even worse, as the player just sit there, while the control window screamed that it didn't understand

Imagine what could happen in a car...

[Laughing Man]

Haha. I can't even get it to control WMP much less foobar2000. But how did you get it working for WMP though? For now I've settled for my memorization of the keys. With space being set to play/pause. I can pretty much access it without taking my eyes off the road lol.

[Lashiec]

I think it works by default. It doesn't work with all programs, though. Winamp, for example, doesn't work at all, and I suspect the skins have something to do with this.

[Laughing Man]

Tried it and I couldn't get it to work. Play, Pause, Stop, none of it would work. I fired up google (ah..yes the next corporation of doom) and found this.

http://www.inkonsoftware.com/DeeJay.aspx

I'll report back soon on how it works.

[Curt]

You could go visit CoolSoft and have a look at SpeechVibe.  The normal price is $46 but until the end of September there is a %40 rebate (from here only) with this coupon code only: ASP104 (thanks, Gautam) - making it $25.

[gjehle]

while speech recognition may work (reasonably) well for 'normal' documents i see no future for it in the programming world
one reason is the nature of most programming languages (maybe except for cobol or stuff like that)
those are the reasons:

* programming languages make use of a lot of special characters
* if the language is case sensitive, good luck
* speech recognition uses quite some heuristics based on 'normal' language

thus, programming languages don't work well.
what i could imagine seeing tho would be macro-based voice recognition, which would need a special support packages for each programming language.
one would define standard blocks (for loops, class templates, switch-case, if-then-else, or more abstract templates) and name them eg. "new for-loop from 0 to 20" and it'll spit out "for(int i=0; i<20; ++i) { }"
this combined with classic keyboard input might have a future.

basically, replace everything you can't do by keyboard shortcuts (aka, you'd have to use your mouse) with a voice macro.
for everything else... no way

[Edvard]

gjehle:

what i could imagine seeing tho would be macro-based voice recognition, which would need a special support packages for each programming language.
one would define standard blocks (for loops, class templates, switch-case, if-then-else, or more abstract templates) and name them eg. "new for-loop from 0 to 20" and it'll spit out "for(int i=0; i<20; ++i) { }"

Since you're running Linux, there is cdecl

Cdecl (and c++decl) is a program for encoding and decoding C (or C++) type declarations.
...
Cdecl reads the named files for statements in the language described below. A transformation is made from that language to C (C++) or pseudo-English.
...
To declare an array of pointers to functions that are like malloc(3), do

    declare fptab as array of pointer to function returning pointer to char

The result of this command is

    char *(*fptab[])()

...and it gets more complex from there, but if a bridge could be made from voice recognition to a similar pseudo-translator, we might get somewhere. And of course, Ruby would probably work just fine as it is.

[Laughing Man]

You could go visit CoolSoft and have a look at SpeechVibe.  The normal price is $46 but until the end of September there is a %40 rebate (from here only) with this coupon code only: ASP104 (thanks, Gautam) - making it $25.

Thanks, I'll take a look at it if I can't get Deejay working. For some reason whenever I try running it, it gives me some Microsoft .net framework binary error.