Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

The tarball, talon-linux.tar.xz, didn't come with a README, neither under root or /resources.

I could certainly have broken run.sh open in vim (and should have), I could have looked into /lib and found the missing dependencies, but given that there was a binary literally called talon, the general expectation is this is the binary to be linked to my PATH and run directly. Using a run.sh is not necessary when the same could be achieved by making the talon file a shell script and renaming the binary to something else.

Yes.

Re your deleted comment about "hostile forks": allowing users to run whatever software they want is precisely the point of open source. It's not "hostile" to have different opinions to you.

The project looks cool nonetheless, but it is still true that if the users don't control the software, the software controls the users.

> very much not open source

I contribute quite a bit to open source as part of my work on Talon, including the speech engine, the tools I use for model training and dataset creation, and I've upstreamed security fixes and other improvements to core projects like CPython and LibUSB.

> except when you contribute code to them

That clause isn't for code contributed to the Talon app, it's so other users in the community can use ad hoc scripts posted to Slack. Talon itself does not use any code under that clause and I still recommend users explicitly license their community code.

I've had the open source conversation plenty of times, but basically it boils down to: it feels like the bare minimum to protect myself from hostile forks given I have been working on it full time for over five years now, give it away completely for free, and provide high quality support.

It's also segmented so all of the primary functionality (e.g. voice commands and their behaviors) are implemented in open source user controlled code, and I open source plenty of the components of Talon.

You might read the handsfreecoding review [1] which covers this a bit.

[1] https://handsfreecoding.org/2021/12/12/talon-in-depth-review...

Talon's alphabet is extremely carefully designed. There's de bruijn sequence style redundant phonetic information in each letter allowing the single syllable words to be mashed together at high speed without pauses (even allows for a bit of slurring to fit more than one letter into a syllable). I can type 60wpm with it, see me spelling a last name around 0:40 in this video for typical usage [1]. It's also carefully tested (with an American accent) to not jam up your mouth / tongue when you say the letters in any order.

You can remap it to whatever you want, and a few users choose either NATO or a custom alphabet. But most stick with Talon's with minor changes (e.g. they might change a specific word if it's harder to say clearly in their accent, or if their mic or environment makes it more difficult to pick up specific sounds).

You can also use the English alphabet for spelling anywhere you can say a word, e.g. "say hello" and "say H E L L O" both work the same.

This isn't a voice assistant where you belt out a command once in a while then move on with your day, and this isn't a low fidelity radio link. These words may be said tens of thousands of times a day. Using three-syllable NATO words is slow and exhausting. It's common for voice programming systems to define their own alphabet based on a truncated NATO alphabet. I went further because I wanted to be able to use vim and play DCSS at very high speeds with my key commands instead of binding a bunch of app specific custom commands.

[1] https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896

Are people still maintaining Serenade? It looks like since they open sourced, it's mostly just been one person committing to it: https://github.com/serenadeai/serenade/commits/master