Speech recognition - Was: Desktop froze

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 2023-06-20 at 17:30 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> [snip] MacBook Air – The 2020 model. I am using the latest macOS,
> Ventura, 13.4. I do actually like Macs, but I'm not wild about this
> version. [snip] Apples own arm instruction set processors have the
> horse power to do all the speech recognition locally [snip]

Hi Liam,

I was hoping you had something to report about Linux speech recognition.
Taking a look at my iPads, only the still supported iPad Pro provides
"Dictation". My iPads as of 2023-06-11 https://i.imgur.com/J7rMbVQ.jpg .
This day I tried to migrate to dark themes, but only the iPad Pro
provides a dark theme, hence the different colours of the folders.

Info about "Dictation": “[snip] When you use Dictation, your device will
indicate in Keyboard Settings if your voice inputs and transcripts for
general text Dictation (for example, composing messages and notes, but
not dictating in a search box) are processed on your device and not sent
to Siri servers. Otherwise, the things you dictate are sent to and
processed on the server. [snip]”

I turned it on and run a short and simple test.

German and English dictionaries are selected. German and English
keyboards are installed. The default language is English, just some apps
are set to German.

Everywhere an onscreen keyboard is available, "Dictation" can be used
instead. This is at least what Apple claims.

I opened the Apple MUA and enabled “Dictation” by pushing a microphone
icon on the onscreen keyboard and said

“hallo wie geht es dir” the speech recognition was very fast, but wrote
“hello, vegan steer”.

The second time I ensured that the German Keyboard is selected. Again I
said
“hallo wie geht es dir”, this time it became
“Hallo, wie geht es dir?”

I spoke in a normal tempo, but relatively “slow normal”, hence I tested
speaking very fast. Again I said “hallo wie geht es dir” really fast, it
wasn’t pronounced as a question, more like an exclamation. However, my
German pronunciation is very clear, even when speaking very fast. It
became “hallo, wie geht es dir?” So the only mistake is the “h” that
should be a capital letter instead.

Then I opened "iSH" an iPad app that provides a Linux shell based on
Alpine Linux. I said "l s space dash h l", it became "LS space dash HL",
not "ls -hl". Then I said "small l small s minus small h small l", this
became "Small adult small ass minus small edge small L".

I tried to make it less complicated and said "lower-case letter l lower-
case letter s", this became "Lowercase L lowercase letter. S." So for
using command line (btw. with root privileges), I either miss code words
or it doesn't work at all. FWIW I tried in German.

"Kleines l kleines s" became "L s", not "ls".

I turned "Dictation" off again in  Settings > General > Keyboard .

Regards,
Ralf