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Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#41

Certainly exists and I have setup this for various blind people who make due. Unfortunately dont recall what it was exactly but they bought it and all that. The thing about voice is how weak it is. Even if you've well trained it and you speak well, which i don't. It wont be as good as a keyboard. Putting work into voice like this for productivity is pointless. Any effort is best placed in brain computer interfaces. H…

Agree completely on your points about brain computer interfaces and voice not being worth investing in outside of supporting people with accessibility issues, unfortunately.

It's also super weird to speak to a computer. Typing, touching or thinking are all fine, but somehow sitting in a room talking to a machine is a bit weird, even though it's not weird if I'm on a call, I can't explain it. Are there others with similar experience?

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#42
post #13

I've heard cursorless ( https://github.com/cursorless-dev/cursorless-talon ) is good but have never tried it. Syntax-aware voice navigation of code, powered by tree-sitter queries! I also have a friend who is a gifted programmer who lost his ability to type about a decade ago; he has put together an open-source software stack to help: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~dwk/ Of course this doesn't really answer your question…

I am a cursorless user myself. Using dictation software for programming is actually relatively fast when you get used to it, but editing code (which is how most of us spend the majority of our time) can be pretty slow. Cursorless was a huge productivity booster for me. It got me to switch from Emacs to VS Code which is saying something.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#43

Is there a high quality voice control for anything? I only ever tried Google Assistant and it mostly always can't comprehend queries beyond "timer 10 minutes", like putting a water boiler on schedule.

I don't remember the last time i had such rage when i tried to voice search for "French Horn Rebellion - This Moment"[1] on my android TV and i didn't want to type it in with the remote. I'm also not a native english speaker

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4khlVbakV_Q

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#45

I'm in the same boat as you, OP. Talon has proven a lifesaver ... or at least it promises to be one. I'm still getting used to it. My finding, for text dictation (not code), is that even halfway decent dictation, such as is available on iPhone, still needs much post-dictation editing. I feel that the biggest impact to be made in this area is superior capabilities for this editing phase. I summarized and wrote up my t…

I have to plug the cursorless vs code extension to speed up code editing. It was a game changer for me.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#46
I'll give an answer in a slightly separate direction: there aren't engines that are both good enough and open enough to hook into that Open Source communities can build around them.

There are two ways that new software gets built: either the market is big enough and accessible enough that commercial software gets built, or the software is easy enough to build that hobbyists enter the space and solve their own problems. For example, the commercial market for keyboard-driven interfaces is also quite small, but we still have stuff like Sway. But a good keyboard-driven interface is easier to build than speech recognition.

I've been curious about this area for a while, but my understanding is voice-to-text Open Source solutions are still kind of primitive for general text transcribing. The libraries aren't very fun to work with, they're often embedded Python/Java "stuff", and the accuracy isn't great if you advance past the level of text transcription. Additionally, controlling computers and hooking into X or Wayland feels a bit hacky.

That being said, I'll push back on people who are saying that no one would want to control an interface this way. The success of systems like Alexa/Siri/Google are pretty definitive proof to me that (all their weaknesses side) there is a market for voice interfaces. But the ties between that market and the desktop are not strong, and the ecosystem isn't open enough to really build on in that direction.

I suspect that until efforts like Mozilla's open speech datasets pick up more steam and become competitive (if they ever do), it's going to be kind of laggy to find solutions because it's not immediately obvious how to enter the market, either as a commercial company or as an Open Source dev. But maybe I'm wrong and I just haven't researched it enough and the area is totally ripe for disruption. Maybe for people with RSI they'd tolerate something like clipping a bluetooth mic to their lapel or something and that would boost accuracy. Maybe there's another way to approach entering code that isn't just straight text recognition, possibly combining it with some kind of AST or code analysis that made it easier to guess what people were saying.

In any case, I don't think the problem is that people don't want to talk to their computers. Personally I don't like using voice assistants, but they are very popular, in no small part because of the voice part. So maybe there is an evolution of desktop UI controls that could become really popular, or at least competitive with entrenched solutions for people with limited mobility or RSI. But it would require someone to introduce some kind of actual UX innovation into the space, or to find a way of getting over the moat around good recognition and OS integration.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#47
post #13

I've heard cursorless ( https://github.com/cursorless-dev/cursorless-talon ) is good but have never tried it. Syntax-aware voice navigation of code, powered by tree-sitter queries! I also have a friend who is a gifted programmer who lost his ability to type about a decade ago; he has put together an open-source software stack to help: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~dwk/ Of course this doesn't really answer your question…

creator of Cursorless here. Happy to answer any questions

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#48

Google and Siri are good at what they do. They aren't good at other things, such as dictation. I see the big problem in voice interaction is that a human being will ask you questions to clarify what you said if they don't understand and current systems don't even try. (Actually the search paradigm lets you do some refinement, "Ok Google" works amazingly well on Android TV.) Superhuman accuracy at dictation doesn't tr…

> Google and Siri are good at what they do. They aren't good at other things, such as dictation.

It's interesting you mention that google isn't good at dictation as I've found it excellent on pixel 6 (maybe the quality varies depending on what hardware you're running on?) If I need to write out anything over a sentence or two on my phone I'll almost always dictate it and as long as I have a reasonable idea what I want to say beforehand it works well.

What I personally find a little jarring is that I find I need to compose what I want in my head further in advance than I would if Im typing as correcting mistakes is more awkward.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#49

Is there a high quality voice control for anything? I only ever tried Google Assistant and it mostly always can't comprehend queries beyond "timer 10 minutes", like putting a water boiler on schedule.

I think it depends on how you define "high quality."

To me, I'll take a restricted set of actions if they work very reliably.

This is what I had back in the 80's with a Covox Voicemaster plugged into to the joystick port of my Commodore 64. It could only understand a few phrases, but I could define those phrases, and it almost always worked.

If you define "high quality" as being able to respond to a seemingly infinite number of queries, but only understanding and replying correctly occasionally, then Siri is closer to what you want.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#50
post #21

... because it's not a good way to control a computer?

Why not? "Open hacker news", "go back", "Play liked playlist in Spotify" Seems fairly reasonable. It need not be the only way, but not having to use my mouse to do stupidly simple tasks wouldn't break my heart.

My first guess would be "Open hacker news" requires clear audible speech. While the KB method just requires pressing 'h' and 'enter'. Also, non-cloud speech recognition just recently got decent.
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