emacs by voice

emacs by voice

[tomer]

sorry for the general question,
Is it possible to write program code (any language) with voice into
emacs.
Is it practical?
Is there anyone who  use voice to operate emacs?


Thanks
Tomer

Re: emacs by voice

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

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tomer wrote:
> sorry for the general question,
> Is it possible to write program code (any language) with voice into
> emacs.
An interesting question, I'd like to know, too. Not for arbitrary input but 
I thought of doing M-x commands by voice while keeping the keyboard focus in 
the buffer. The commands would be far easier to recognize unambiguously, 
because there's a finite list of commands to begin with, with clearly 
dash-separated words. This question occurred to me after seeing how much 
difficulty the Vista speech recognizer had with arbitrary input picking the 
most probable words in my second-language English speech, in stead. But with 
Emacs or some other limited domain, things would be a lot easier.

I guess the availability depends on how good speech recognizers are 
available for the platform you want to run Emacs in. Windows has commercial 
stuff like Dragon Naturally Speaking, but howabout the *nix projects. Speech 
recognition, like OCR and screen reading, is highly non-trivial to do very 
well, and not likely to be your average hacker's pet project, though there 
are always exceptions. Of course, then there's the question of having the 
Elisp APIs for whatever recognizer you wish to use.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä
Accessibility, Apps and Coding plus Synths and Music:
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi

Re: emacs by voice

[harven]

tomer <tomer1levin@walla.co.il> writes:

> sorry for the general question,
> Is it possible to write program code (any language) with voice into
> emacs.
> Is it practical?
> Is there anyone who  use voice to operate emacs?
>
>
> Thanks
> Tomer

Have a look at the wiki:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacSpeak

Re: emacs by voice

[Joost Kremers]

harven wrote:
> tomer <tomer1levin@walla.co.il> writes:
>> Is it possible to write program code (any language) with voice into
>> emacs.
>> Is it practical?
>> Is there anyone who  use voice to operate emacs?
>>
> Have a look at the wiki:
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacSpeak

emacspeak goes the other way: it's a speech synthesizer, turning text into
speech. it doesn't (AFAIK) turn speech into text, i.e. can't be used to
operate emacs by vocal commands.


-- 
Joost Kremers                                      joostkremers@yahoo.com
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)

Re: emacs by voice

[harven]

Joost Kremers <joostkremers@yahoo.com> writes:

> harven wrote:
>> tomer <tomer1levin@walla.co.il> writes:
>>> Is it possible to write program code (any language) with voice into
>>> emacs.
>>> Is it practical?
>>> Is there anyone who  use voice to operate emacs?
>>>
>> Have a look at the wiki:
>> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacSpeak
>
> emacspeak goes the other way: it's a speech synthesizer, turning text into
> speech. it doesn't (AFAIK) turn speech into text, i.e. can't be used to
> operate emacs by vocal commands.
>

So, maybe you want EmacsListen ?
http://shorttalk-emacs.sourceforge.net/
I am not sure this is still maintained. The google newsgroup EmacsListen
seems to tell that someone actually succeeded in using DragonNaturallySpeaking 
with emacs. I think there is also a foot project (feet driven keyboard) 
but no emacs implementation yet.

Cheers

Re: Emacs TTS (Was: emacs by voice)

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

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harven wrote:
[TTS]
> Have a look at the wiki:
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacSpeak
Too bad Speechd-el isn't mentioned. That's what I'm using:

http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd-el#emacspeak

BTW: The Emacspeak instructions are badly out of date. I haven't heard 
anyone sucfesfully using the ViaVoice TTS for LInux in quite some time: I'm 
on the Orca and Speechd-el lists as well as alt.comp.blind-users. Most tend 
to use eSpeak or Festival as far as the freebies go, and Dectalk or TTSynth, 
the same engine as in ViaVoice and Eloquence, for commercial stuff.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä
Accessibility, Apps and Coding plus Synths and Music:
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi

Re: Emacs TTS (Was: emacs by voice)

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
> harven wrote:
> [TTS]
>> Have a look at the wiki:
>> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacSpeak
> Too bad Speechd-el isn't mentioned. That's what I'm using:
> 
> http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd-el#emacspeak
> 
> BTW: The Emacspeak instructions are badly out of date. I haven't heard 
> anyone sucfesfully using the ViaVoice TTS for LInux in quite some time: I'm 
> on the Orca and Speechd-el lists as well as alt.comp.blind-users. Most tend 
> to use eSpeak or Festival as far as the freebies go, and Dectalk or TTSynth, 
> the same engine as in ViaVoice and Eloquence, for commercial stuff.

Is it possible for you to update these instructions?

Re: Emacs TTS

[Robert D. Crawford]

"Veli-Pekka Tätilä" <vtatila@gmailRemoveToReply.com> writes:

> BTW: The Emacspeak instructions are badly out of date. 

Are you talking about the installation instructions?  

> I haven't heard anyone sucfesfully using the ViaVoice TTS for LInux in
> quite some time:

You should drop by the emacspeak list or check out the archive.  Many on
the list, including myself, have been using the ViaVoice tts for quite a
while now.

> I'm on the Orca and Speechd-el lists as well as
> alt.comp.blind-users. Most tend to use eSpeak or Festival as far as
> the freebies go, and Dectalk or TTSynth, the same engine as in
> ViaVoice and Eloquence, for commercial stuff.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying.  Above you say that you
have not heard of anyone successfully using the ViaVoice synth and here
you say TTSynth is being used.  Are there differences?  I was under the
impression that they are the same thing.

rdc
-- 
Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@comcast.net

It'll be just like Beggars' Canyon back home.
		-- Luke Skywalker

Re: Emacs TTS

[Tim X]

"Veli-Pekka Tätilä" <vtatila@gmailRemoveToReply.com> writes:

> harven wrote:
> [TTS]
>> Have a look at the wiki:
>> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacSpeak
> Too bad Speechd-el isn't mentioned. That's what I'm using:
>
Its a wiki, add it!

> http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd-el#emacspeak
>
> BTW: The Emacspeak instructions are badly out of date. I haven't heard 
> anyone sucfesfully using the ViaVoice TTS for LInux in quite some time: I'm 
> on the Orca and Speechd-el lists as well as alt.comp.blind-users. Most tend 
> to use eSpeak or Festival as far as the freebies go, and Dectalk or TTSynth, 
> the same engine as in ViaVoice and Eloquence, for commercial stuff.

I think that is incorrect. There was a time a while back, when IBM
stopped making the ViaVoice available for free that people stopped using
it. However, that changed once a few places, like oralux managed to
organise a deal where they could sell ViaVoice runtime licenses for
about $50 US. At no time did emacspeak stop supporting ViaVoice
Outloud. if you were able to get a version of ViaVoice that worked under
Linux, then emacspeak supported it fine. The problem was that until a
deal was sorted out to get the runtime license at a reasonable cost, you
had to either buy the SDK (over $300US) or buy a 'bundle' of runtime
licenses (and I think you still had to buy the SDK). The issue was not
with emacspeak. I know for certain that Raman, myself and a number of
other emacspeak users are using ViaVoice Outloud. 


Emacspeak still supports the dectalk express, software
dectalk and espeak. Festival and flite are not directly supported, but
there are patches out there that do provide support (there has been work
on eflite in the last fortnight). 

I don't know if the instructions are out of date or not as I've not
needed to use them. Once you have ViaVoice installed, the procedure
for building support for it within emacspeak have not changed at all as
far as I can recall. Essentially, you just have to install extended Tcl,
go into the linux-outloud directory and type make. 

Note to the OP, this won't assist you in what you are after at all. Your
original post was about speech recognition. Neither emacspeak or speechd
provide speech recognition. They only provide text-to-speech, which is
going in the wrong direction for what you want. 

IBM did have another package called something like ViaVoice dictate or
something similar. Not sure what happened to it, but I do remember
someone posting an emacs mode to work with it quite some time ago
i.e. 98/99. If you are running under Linux, there is also the sphinx2
(??) project that was bringing speech recognition to X windows. Not
looked at it in a while, so don't know what its status is. 

So, the basic answer to your question is "Yes, it is possible to add
speech recognition, but there may not be any easy 'out of the box'
solution. You will need some additional software, possibly sphinx,
ViaVoice dictation or something else depending on your platform. It ahs
been done to some extent before, so googling may help.

HTH

Tim


Tim
-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au