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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

Are there any good quality OSS speech recognition libraries that are easy to get started with, or is it still so complex/expensive that this is a fantasy?

I really love the idea of hacking something together for development so I don't need to use my arms and hands so much, or could lessen my mouse use (for accessibility reasons), but I don't know how realistic that is.

Edit: I looked into cloud-based ASR, such as that provided by Azure and AWS, but that would mean network latency on top of the recognition latency, and that would drive me nuts!

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Though not entirely with OSS libraries, there was a guy who did the "development without arms/hands" side of this back in 2013:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWyMA_bT7UI

It used the windows version of Dragon Dictate that had a python interface which was then hooked up to emacs, iirc. I attempted to replicate his system at some point but never got it working -- seems that the libraries he referenced weren't well maintained and/or running windows through a VM on my mac introduced additional issues.

(Slightly offtopic, sorry) I think the best path to “programming by conversation” is to have a programming language designed specifically for that goal, so perhaps you want to research that. I’d say a version of prolog / attempto controlled english / similar functional language (to work on small bits of mostly contained meaning), a verbal repl that is carefully designed to explore data, generate test data, manage errors correctly, and highlight what’s important, etc. would be a super interesting project, that can then be easily plugged into voice interfaces.

Doesn't seem particularly OT to me - it's an interesting idea!

I'm not totally convinved that the language needs to be designed specifically for voice coding though - I can see how having an IDE designed for it would be a huge bonus though... damn, another interesting side project to add to the list!

I dream of building a competitor to Siri and google and I’d probably use https://snips.ai/. I think it gains recognition accuracy by having a limited skill set. Looks good though and has functionality for defining skills.

Speech recognition of a small set of possible words is basically a solved problem. It's why you've been able to call a phone support line and read numbers to it for years and years now; speech recognition for 10 digits and a handful of control words is basically done.

So, if your project can be built on that, good news; you can build now.

This looks interesting, as I don't need "conversation-level" ASR, I'd just need it to work with a limited grammar.

But I'm unsure of what Snips actually is - I had a look at the website, but I don't know if this is OSS, commercial software, a library or what?

I've been trying out Snips, it's pretty cool and works reasonably well. A lot of the overall system is open source and runs offline, but the training happens on their servers and is closed source AFAIK. You download the trained model and can run it on a raspberry pi etc offline. But they claim that what Snips offers for free isn't nearly as good as what the commercial offering does. My priorities unfortunately shifted away from finding out about the quality difference. IIRC Snips's business model is to create custom voice agents that run offline for other companies and services around that, eg. custom hotwords etc.

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