Possible minor breakthrough on the editing by voice front...

I just found this online:

http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/index.html

It's a C++ application that interfaces with Python 2.0 and any reasonably recent version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking (including cheap ones) and allows you to code macros in Python.

Some contributed code looks very promising. I am in the process of attempting to install it at the moment. Some people have done some work towards making it work well with emacs -- whilst I am not a great fan of that editor, I have a feeling that with some clever hacking it might just do what is necessary in the short-term. Longer term, it would be really nice to actually implement the mega editor, but in the meantime, this might well give me a nice way to actually write the code for the big one!

More when I have done more experimentation -- watch this space.

Hello, World!

Well, it does appear that the Python based NaturallySpeaking macro system does in fact work!

If I say: Demo Sample one, (I said that one word at a time with long gaps to avoid it being treated as a macro), I have a little bit of code that output following:

Hello, World!


It really works! By the way, this entire life journal entry was made entirely without touching the keyboard.

Yes, Nat Link could well be the answer...

Well, I'll just tried installing a third-party macro package written by one of the uses of Nat Link. It allows you to type keywords in one of the two main ways that programmers do it. If you say, "hungarian goulash is nice", you get:

goulashIsNice

Or if you say "joined under this is cool", you get:

this_is_cool

It appears that:

1. I am about to learn Python!
2. If this isn't the whole answer, it certainly is part of it.

Best of all, this actually still works with the cheapest version of NaturallySpeaking which is actually what I am using. My next free time project will be to try this out with a variety of different editors and see which one works best. I am loathe to admit it, but emacs may well be favourite, especially as it is specifically supported by Touch Stream. In the first instance, I'm going to try to prototype some of my ideas using an existing editor. I just so want to be able to say, "insert while loop" and actually have it work...

Closest 50 non-Friends for compilerbitch:

1: evil_nick, 2: mirabehn, 3: the_alchemist, 4: rowan_leigh, 5: adventurers, 6: fluffymormegil, 7: duranorak, 8: bosedbybeloved, 9: andrewwyld, 10: taimatsu, 11: pussinboots, 12: rathenar, 13: vectorious, 14: kmazzy, 15: ivorygirl, 16: mjg59, 17: randomchris, 18: lemur_man, 19: officialgaiman, 20: aiwendel, 21: news, 22: robert_jones, 23: patfest, 24: angelislington, 25: lusercop, 26: morayallan, 27: skx, 28: martling, 29: figg, 30: judeo, 31: mathie, 32: mquin, 33: pjc51, 34: rga24, 35: section117, 36: meirion, 37: damerell, 38: sphyg, 39: emperor, 40: altoclef, 41: bibliotheca, 42: heidifox, 43: theninjakitten, 44: hobbitblue, 45: jenni_the_odd, 46: fanf, 47: neonchameleon, 48: cjwatson, 49: denisleary, 50: dinkybossetti

Very interesting!

http://www.gothboffs.co.uk/trustflow/trustflow.pl

First test: writing a binding for the LiveJournal client

So far, this seems to actually be quite easy.

I got Nat Link installed quite straightforwardly, although I did initially make the mistake of installing python 2.3. Seemingly, the binary release only works with 2.0. Uninstall, reinstall. No biggie.

I created a file to encapsulate the macros, and started by cutting and pasting some boilerplate code from one of the samples. Within about five minutes, I had something brain-dead happening that correctly recognised the live Journal window and refused to allow its specialised macros to be used anywhere else. So far so good.

Next up was to support a few simple macros for inserting tags. I can now make things go bold or italic easily.

Inserting cut tags is now as easy as selecting the text and saying "insert cut tags". like so:

( Read more... )

I can also easily insert user tags:fluffymark, livredor, galliana, etc.

Finally, I added a few keyboard shortcuts to make it quicker to get at things like the friends page or to start a spell checker, etc.

Live Journal client macros now online

If you're interested, you can find the python source code on my personal web site in the free software section.

Have fun!