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Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

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Re: Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During cycling! Do you have a phone mount on your bike that you use while biking or is it all in-ear?

... I cannot think of an activity less suitable for coding (except scuba diving) I would die In minutes

Think long winding, quiet, dedicated cycling roads in forested areas and natural parks. Not busy roads shared with cars and lorries.

Re: Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

#62
post #43

Stt/tts systems always seem to me so promising, but I pretty much never use voice to interface with a computer. Sometimes instead of typing on my phone, I use a voice dictation. I would be keen to use voice to control Claude code, but I've always felt that the way I speak is different from the way I write good prompts. Fishing for anecdotes here, does anyone have any good tts/stt experiences?

I do a ton of coding (codex) with a tts/stt wrapper. During walks, cycling, in the car. Not every task is suited to this style of interaction, but many are. Long form codex replies are condensed, code blocks are suppressed all in the name of making it work for tts feedback. So it works best on well defined projects with guardrails, where you know the agent can perform well.

This is extremely dangerous and you should stop doing it.

https://etsc.eu/tiny-proportion-of-drivers-understand-danger...

Re: Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

#63
post #43

Stt/tts systems always seem to me so promising, but I pretty much never use voice to interface with a computer. Sometimes instead of typing on my phone, I use a voice dictation. I would be keen to use voice to control Claude code, but I've always felt that the way I speak is different from the way I write good prompts. Fishing for anecdotes here, does anyone have any good tts/stt experiences?

I've always dreamed of having the ability to just talk to my computer (in the right circumstances) so I actually worked in the field for many years. The main reason I never use speech recognition today is because I have zero interest of sending recordings of my voice to the servers of some global corporations.

Running speech recognition and TTS locally is quite feasible, as projects like this one show.

Re: Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

#64
post #43

Stt/tts systems always seem to me so promising, but I pretty much never use voice to interface with a computer. Sometimes instead of typing on my phone, I use a voice dictation. I would be keen to use voice to control Claude code, but I've always felt that the way I speak is different from the way I write good prompts. Fishing for anecdotes here, does anyone have any good tts/stt experiences?

I do a ton of coding (codex) with a tts/stt wrapper. During walks, cycling, in the car. Not every task is suited to this style of interaction, but many are. Long form codex replies are condensed, code blocks are suppressed all in the name of making it work for tts feedback. So it works best on well defined projects with guardrails, where you know the agent can perform well.

I can't honestly think of a case where this would be remotely useful. This goes somehow beyond vibe coding to vibe interaction, where the only feedback comes via the AI. I'd love to see a concrete example of this working practice.

Re: Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

#65
post #43

Stt/tts systems always seem to me so promising, but I pretty much never use voice to interface with a computer. Sometimes instead of typing on my phone, I use a voice dictation. I would be keen to use voice to control Claude code, but I've always felt that the way I speak is different from the way I write good prompts. Fishing for anecdotes here, does anyone have any good tts/stt experiences?

[flagged]

Re: Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

#66
post #29

So at that tiny 500kb size I imagine it could be compiled to web assembly, and run entirely in the browser right? Couldn’t find a link, is that hard to do?

Should be very doable. I ship a small CNN in a browser extension via onnxruntime-web and the model weights were never the bottleneck, the runtime was. The wasm backend adds a few MB of runtime before your first inference, so a 500kb model with a lean hand-rolled wasm build would actually beat most "tiny" browser ML deployments in total download.

One gotcha if anyone wants this in a Chrome extension: MV3 requires 'wasm-unsafe-eval' in the CSP for any wasm at all, which surprised me the first time a build that worked fine as a web page died silently as an extension.

Re: Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

#67
post #43

Stt/tts systems always seem to me so promising, but I pretty much never use voice to interface with a computer. Sometimes instead of typing on my phone, I use a voice dictation. I would be keen to use voice to control Claude code, but I've always felt that the way I speak is different from the way I write good prompts. Fishing for anecdotes here, does anyone have any good tts/stt experiences?

I do a ton of coding (codex) with a tts/stt wrapper. During walks, cycling, in the car. Not every task is suited to this style of interaction, but many are. Long form codex replies are condensed, code blocks are suppressed all in the name of making it work for tts feedback. So it works best on well defined projects with guardrails, where you know the agent can perform well.

That's fantastic. I have long, winding trails near me also and one of these days I also want to start prompting a coding agent on my bike with a headset. Do you recommend any particular type of headset?

Edit: never mind, I see you already suggested the Shokz OpenComm2 in another comment. Thanks!

Re: Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a ton of coding (codex) with a tts/stt wrapper. During walks, cycling, in the car. Not every task is suited to this style of interaction, but many are. Long form codex replies are condensed, code blocks are suppressed all in the name of making it work for tts feedback. So it works best on well defined projects with guardrails, where you know the agent can perform well.

That's fantastic. I have long, winding trails near me also and one of these days I also want to start prompting a coding agent on my bike with a headset. Do you recommend any particular type of headset? Edit: never mind, I see you already suggested the Shokz OpenComm2 in another comment. Thanks!

This is so alien to me. Why not plug into the machine matrix when out in the great outdoors enjoying sublime nature? Why not!

Re: Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fantastic. I have long, winding trails near me also and one of these days I also want to start prompting a coding agent on my bike with a headset. Do you recommend any particular type of headset? Edit: never mind, I see you already suggested the Shokz OpenComm2 in another comment. Thanks!

This is so alien to me. Why not plug into the machine matrix when out in the great outdoors enjoying sublime nature? Why not!

It's not a replacement for being outdoors, connecting with nature. It replaces indoor desk bound office work.
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