MAR
13
2017

New life in Simon speech recognition

Submitted by fux

As my blog as FSFE Fellow No. 1 is temporarily not aggregated on planet.kde.org and my private blog about woodwork (German only) currently only tells about a wooden staircase (but soon again about wooden jewelry) I'm building I found a new place for my KDE (non-Randa) related stuff: KDE Blogs. Thanks to the KDE Sysadmin team for the quick setup!

Since the beginning of this year there is some new activity about and around the Simon speech recogition. We had several weekly IRC meeting (Logs: W02, W03, W04, W05, W06, W07 and W08) and there is a workboard with tasks. Our plan for the near future is it to release a last Kdelibs4 and Qt4 based version of Simon. Afterwards we focus on the KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5 port and then we might have time and work power to look at new feature development like e.g. Lera or the integration of the Kaldi speech recognition framework. But there is parallel work as well like creating Scenarios, working on speech (acustic) and language models and document all this.

So to reach this first goal of a last kdelibs4/Qt4 based version of Simon (the last stable release of Simon happened back in 2013 and there are some commits waiting to be released) we need your help. Would you like to work on documentation checking, compiling first Alpha versions of the new release or just writing about Simon or showcasing it in videos then please get in contact with is via email, IRC (#kde-accessibility on freenode.net) or the KDE Forums

And if you'd like to start right away you'll find us tomorrow (Tuesday, 14th of March) at 10pm (CEST) in #kde-accessibility on freenode.net. Looking forward to meeting you!

PS: Something different and how times change: Just bought a dishwasher and got a printed copy of the GNU GPL ;-).

Comments

I'm delighted to hear that Simon listens is coming back to life. I followed this project very closely in the past and was sad it never reached its potential for the millions of people who could use it for e.g. dictation. Open source speech recognition powered by Simon could be unique and competitive at a time when speech technology is becoming integrated into millions of household consumer devices. Keep up the good work!

By Sam Tuke at Sun, 03/19/2017 - 10:11

Hi, I'm just stumbling through because I'm interested in the topic (if fact though, of the projects I've seen Simon looks pretty interesting :P ). Anyway, just wanted to point out that the links to the Logs given in the post are to the non-public version (ie require a password), and I reckoned that may not have been intended.
Not a problem for me, by the way, cause I just found links to the public versions on the mailing list archive ( https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-speech/ , for anyone else that happens to be looking)...
Ok, thanks for your time, and maybe I'll get back to you (guys) more generally some time soon :D !
Regards, Sean

By Sean Scherer at Thu, 03/30/2017 - 07:35

Morning Sean
Thanks for your comment. For everybody with a KDE identity account just change the "p" in the link to a "public" and then you see the content.
Best regards
Mario

By fux at Thu, 03/30/2017 - 08:14