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On Voice Coding

dusty.phillips.codes

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Re: On Voice Coding

#171

Post by lunixbochs »

daanzu wrote: post #169
LexiconCode wrote: post #101

Greetings Everyone, I help maintain the Caster project. The key difference from other solutions out there as we seek to support a completely open source voice coding stack. Open source is only way to go long term if you're going to being using a tool for most of your life. Fortunately for some it acts as a bridge until their RSI symptoms becomes manageable or goes into remission. We are working towards cross-platform…

I said this in another comment, but it can't be emphasized enough: I created Kaldi Active Grammar because I didn't trust relying on closed source software for something so crucial to my productivity, where a decision by an outside party determines whether I can function. As a bonus, open source means I can make it work better to fit my needs than closed source ever could. For what it's worth, my voice is quite abnorm…

I understand and won't argue on your preference for the core Talon app. However, as all of my wav2letter code, models, tools, training methodology, and general advice (e.g. I am very active on the github/facebookresearch/wav2letter issue tracker helping others) are open source, and wav2letter as used in Talon is built from the public repository and dynamically linked, I don't think the speech engine is the place to speak against Talon's source policy.

Re: On Voice Coding

#172

Post by iudqnolq »

daanzu wrote: post #168
iudqnolq wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a non-technical friend who says Dragon is too unreliable to be usable. My intuition was that the problem is probably somewhere else and that if Dragon doesn't work nothing will. I'm under the assumption that competing voice recognition software competes on price. Is that assumption wrong? (For example, I suspect the microphone their school supplies them with may be no good)

For what it's worth, my voice is quite abnormal, so most untrained speech recognition is terrible for me, and even performing the normal "training" for Dragon still resulted in very poor accuracy. However, apparently their training is quite limited, because once I developed my Kaldi Active Grammar [1], and did my own direct training, the results were fantastic in comparison, with orders of magnitude better accuracy.…

Very interesting. I'll take a look and see if I can easily package that in a way someone non-technical could use

Re: On Voice Coding

#173

Post by daanzu »

lunixbochs wrote: post #171
daanzu wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said this in another comment, but it can't be emphasized enough: I created Kaldi Active Grammar because I didn't trust relying on closed source software for something so crucial to my productivity, where a decision by an outside party determines whether I can function. As a bonus, open source means I can make it work better to fit my needs than closed source ever could. For what it's worth, my voice is quite abnorm…

I understand and won't argue on your preference for the core Talon app. However, as all of my wav2letter code, models, tools, training methodology, and general advice (e.g. I am very active on the github/facebookresearch/wav2letter issue tracker helping others) are open source, and wav2letter as used in Talon is built from the public repository and dynamically linked, I don't think the speech engine is the place to s…

Sorry, I was only using the speech engine accuracy as an example. But the freedom of open source stands for any part of software: Dragon's spectacular failures for me are only in part because of its engine. Also, is the command portion of Talon's wav2letter backend open source? Nonetheless, thank you for releasing some of your work. It is all helpful.

Re: On Voice Coding

#174

Post by daanzu »

lunixbochs wrote: post #170
daanzu wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment fails to mention Dragonfly with my Kaldi Active Grammar backend [1], which is cross platform (Windows/Linux now and Mac functional and to be released soon), completely free with no private beta features (although I do accept donations), and 100% open source (unlike Talon). The speech recognition is local, with extremely low latency. See the video demonstration [2] on the project page. I think the underly…

I think to state "unmatched accuracy" in good faith we should actually come up with a common benchmark and measure against it. I believe there aren't really any clean benchmarks for command accuracy floating around (it would be ideal if we used a strict grammar to properly measure the command decoders), and a wav2letter model holds the state of the art for librispeech WER% as of 2019. I found your measurement here [1…

I am all for devising a good, fair apples to apples comparison. If you have any suggestions, let me know. In lieu of that, I use what I have available. While accuracy numbers from papers are informative and interesting, I don't think they directly apply to our usage particularly well. I would prefer to use numbers from actual usage.

Re: On Voice Coding

#175

Post by lunixbochs »

daanzu wrote: post #173
lunixbochs wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand and won't argue on your preference for the core Talon app. However, as all of my wav2letter code, models, tools, training methodology, and general advice (e.g. I am very active on the github/facebookresearch/wav2letter issue tracker helping others) are open source, and wav2letter as used in Talon is built from the public repository and dynamically linked, I don't think the speech engine is the place to s…

Sorry, I was only using the speech engine accuracy as an example. But the freedom of open source stands for any part of software: Dragon's spectacular failures for me are only in part because of its engine. Also, is the command portion of Talon's wav2letter backend open source? Nonetheless, thank you for releasing some of your work. It is all helpful.

Yes, the decoder in the open-source talonvoice/wav2letter/decoder will decode commands alongside speech if you hand it an NFA blob describing the command graph. It's up to you to generate that NFA, but it's probably identical to the graph you're creating with FSTs, and the C structures are described in the source/header.

Re: On Voice Coding

#176

Post by daanzu »

iudqnolq wrote: post #172
daanzu wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, my voice is quite abnormal, so most untrained speech recognition is terrible for me, and even performing the normal "training" for Dragon still resulted in very poor accuracy. However, apparently their training is quite limited, because once I developed my Kaldi Active Grammar [1], and did my own direct training, the results were fantastic in comparison, with orders of magnitude better accuracy.…

Very interesting. I'll take a look and see if I can easily package that in a way someone non-technical could use

If they are using Windows, packaging is quite easy: see the winpython distribution of KaldiAG. The more difficult part is writing the commands: it is not hard programming, but it is technical. But if they can describe what they would want, someone else may be able to write it easily. The personalized training is still pretty new and raw, and it needs a lot of setup to do the training itself. Without knowing more about what your friend found problematic, it is hard to say what could help the most.

Re: On Voice Coding

#177

Post by _-___________-_ »

daanzu wrote: post #166
lunixbochs wrote: post #22

This post starts out talking about expecting to spend around $1,000. There are at least two cross-platform projects where the biggest expense is a microphone instead of software. 1. My project, Talon. Windows/Linux/Mac support, and a first party local speech recognition engine that is pretty good and getting better. It’s free, but the engine is in a private beta (which is $15/mo to support development, optional if th…

This comment fails to mention Dragonfly with my Kaldi Active Grammar backend [1], which is cross platform (Windows/Linux now and Mac functional and to be released soon), completely free with no private beta features (although I do accept donations), and 100% open source (unlike Talon). The speech recognition is local, with extremely low latency. See the video demonstration [2] on the project page. I think the underly…

I realise this is a little off-topic, but FYI the bolding of so many words & phrases in the README for kaldi-active-grammar makes it really hard to read for me.

Re: On Voice Coding

#178

Post by _-___________-_ »

lunixbochs wrote: post #22

This post starts out talking about expecting to spend around $1,000. There are at least two cross-platform projects where the biggest expense is a microphone instead of software. 1. My project, Talon. Windows/Linux/Mac support, and a first party local speech recognition engine that is pretty good and getting better. It’s free, but the engine is in a private beta (which is $15/mo to support development, optional if th…

On the homepage for Talon it lists macOS under dependencies. I've actually come across the homepage before and didn't look into it further because I thought it was Mac-only.

Re: On Voice Coding

#179

Post by _-___________-_ »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #178
lunixbochs wrote: post #22

This post starts out talking about expecting to spend around $1,000. There are at least two cross-platform projects where the biggest expense is a microphone instead of software. 1. My project, Talon. Windows/Linux/Mac support, and a first party local speech recognition engine that is pretty good and getting better. It’s free, but the engine is in a private beta (which is $15/mo to support development, optional if th…

On the homepage for Talon it lists macOS under dependencies. I've actually come across the homepage before and didn't look into it further because I thought it was Mac-only.

Hm, it does seem to be Mac-only? You mention "Windows/Linux/Mac support" in your comment; is Linux support released yet?

Re: On Voice Coding

#180

Post by short_sells_poo »

tcoff91 wrote: post #117
short_sells_poo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea of TabNine, unfortunately it doesn't seem to be super well supported :( There are no news on whether it is being actively developed and the current implementation is unusable in a corporate environment because it can't dial home through a proxy so it refuses to activate the license. It's a shame too because it was basically a "shut up and take my money" reaction from me. I'd pay for this product. I'd…

It has a completely local option which is the default.

Yes, but it still needs to talk to it's servers once to unlock the restricted version. It's all nice and dandy that after the one time activation it can function fully locally, but I never get to that point because the pointless "feature" of activation can't get through the corporate proxy.

So to recap:

1. There is currently no paid license

2. The free version nevertheless needs to be activated online to unlock the full power (otherwise there are severe limitations)

3. It can't handle proxies, so you can't activate it at all in corporate environments

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