On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 2:59 AM, Peter Grasch <pe...@grasch.net> wrote: > Hello, > > for those of you that do not yet know me, my name is Peter Grasch and I > currently maintain the Simon project (http://simon.kde.org), a speech > recognition project in KDE's extragear. > > Over the course of the summer, I have been working on bringing dictation > capabilities to Simon (more info & demo video: http://grasch.net/node/22). > Now, I'm trying to build up a network of developers and researchers that > work together on building high accuracy, large vocabulary speech > recognition systems for a variety of domains (desktop dictation being > one of them). > > Building such systems using free software and free resources requires a > lot of work in many different areas (software development, signal > processing, linguistics, etc.). > In order to facilitate collaboration and to establish a sustainable > community between volunteers of such diverse backgrounds, I am convinced > that the right organizational structure is crucial to ensuring continued > long-term success. > > Naturally, as a KDE contributer, I would like to launch this project as > part of KDE. I talked to quite a number of the people who expressed > interest in taking up an active role in this effort, and this is what we > would like to propose: > * A new category in KDE's extragear called "Speech" (putting it on the > same level as e.g., "Network"). Rationale: Not all speech recognition > applications are necessarily related to accessibility (e.g., lecture > transcription) and splitting up the projects in different categories > would hinder collaboration. > * Creating the "open speech group" (name still a work in progress) and > setting up a project page for it. This would serve as little else than a > common label for all projects that are part of the initiative - > basically the equivalent of "KDE Multimedia Team" but for speech instead > of multimedia. Rationale: A common brand makes it easier to market and > represent the collective effort of all sub-projects. > > I've obviously read the KDE manifesto carefully and I think that such a > group would be in line with the overall spirit, even though there are > some details that I feel the need to point out explicitly: > Some of the sub-projects may not necessarily be about end-user software > or even software at all (e.g., speech modeling). However, please keep in > mind that this is a sub-project of a larger initiative that is very much > about end-user software; splitting the speech modeling in a separate > project just makes sense because it's an ambitious project in it's own > right. > Some of sub projects may appear to diverge from "established practices" > (by not using C++, for example) but that is mostly because there won't > be any similar KDE projects (for example, somebody is already working on > a web-based transcriber system based on ruby on rails) or "special > considerations" (e.g., an application for Mac OS X may use the native > toolkit because the KDE infrastructure for OS X is not sufficiently mature). > > I'm posting this here on the community list because I want to hear your > thoughts on the proposal. Do you think that the 'open speech group' > would fit within KDE? > > Best regards, > Peter
+1 "Accessibility" is an important aspect of the Simon project, but can also be limiting as you explain. Example: Tablets and smartphones are mostly for content consumption rather than creation. Adding speech recognition to Plasma Active would be nifty. Carl _______________________________________________ kde-community mailing list kde-community@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community