Just a thought: Have you tried Dasher…?
It’s an alternative input method. Might be worth giving a try.
Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
71–80 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I pressed 'h', and it didn't do anything. Context matters with such shortcuts. Even if I make sure that I have the location bar selected, focused and clear, 'h enter' takes me to a completely different website - because hacker news is actually 'news.ycombinator.com', so it's not the default by typing'ctrl-k h enter'. And let's be frank. Even if we do get voice control, it's not going to somehow take our keyboards and…
In principle there could be voice shortcuts; currently there seems to be an expectation that voice interfaces should be entirely limited to natural language words and sentences, but if we're willing to let this constraint go (at least for "power user shortcuts") and just design bespoke syllables in IPA or whatever, we could probably come up with something more efficient.
It also ought to be possible to specifically design interleaved voice+keyboard, voice+mouse, voice+touch, voice+pen, etc. interactions that could be more expressive and efficient than either input method by itself.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
#73Just a thought: Have you tried Dasher…? It’s an alternative input method. Might be worth giving a try. https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html
oooh, I always wanted that. Sad it doesn't look like it's advanced much.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
#74Is 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
I feel you. My TV seems to understand whatever it wants. But for whatever reason the talk button is super present on the remote.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
#75Is 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 infinit…
Totally agree. I too had the Covox voice recognizer on an SX-64 doing voice-controlled x10 (and other) home automation in the '80s. The amazing thing is that despite the fact that an RPi 4 has more power than a Cray had back then, modern voice recognition really isn't much better than it was then. (Although it was pretty speaker-dependent...)
I have a handful of Echo Dots and Shows in places I don't mind the security risk, and they are maddeningly incompetent at doing anything in the real world other than telling the weather and acting as a voice-controlled radio (their main use...)
It would be interesting to go back to the Covox approach and rebuild it for today's tech from the ground up (shouldn't need the hardware anymore...), as it worked surprisingly well on computers that had less resources than many (most?) of today's microcontrollers...
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
#76I'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.
Same. Have to disagree though. I've been reintroducing a keyboard here and there, and whenever I have to do something in the VSCode editor, I get frustrated with the speed and end up going back to Cursorless.
I think it's a lot faster than keyboard / mouse, mostly because of how little moving of the cursor you have to do.
Could be I was slow to begin with, not super efficient with vim or emacs.
Also, "editing" is the fastest part for me, due to "bring" and "change". So little movement.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
#77Part of the problem is that context is something AI is bad at and instructions are highly context dependent.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
#78Arguably, one might wish to create a audible, non-linguistic shorthand for positional control, that would allow for higher efficiency when, say, retouching an image within Photoshop, but without the use of hands.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
#79Talon + Cursorless.
People have built the tools you're talking about. They're Talon and Cursorless.
I think you'd be shocked if you saw how productive some people in the Talon community are. Be sure to join the community Slack.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?
#80... 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.
The problem I think comes from a gap between distribution of levels of efficiency for computer-human interfaces.
Take “Open Hacker News” for example. One user might Click Browser > Open bookmarks tab > “Hacker News”.
Another, having set up a series of hotkeys, will go (on a windows machine, taskbar set for Browser pinned in position 1):
Win+1 > Ctrl+3
That is incredibly fast, much faster than saying it.
My guess is that much of the software engineering world is either users who can do the first very quickly or don’t find it cumbersome, or users who set up hotkeys like the latter and will outrace the speed of human speech on any given day. Thus the problem gets little attention.