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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Just open emacs.

This program outputs like a keyboard. And, in English at least, it works really well. I cannot believe it.

I’ve used it for a while in German and in English and I was impressed, too, with its recognition performance. Even the small and therefore fast language models perform decently. However, a major downside is that it doesn’t do punctuation, new lines, capitalization, and similar. This means that you have to edit a lot of the recognized text by hand, which obviously spoils the fun. Having said that, the front end code is in python and you can easily hack it. With a small handful of lines of code I was able to address some of these issues somewhat.

We are working on punctuation/capitalization. Models are ready but not yet integrated. German BERT-based model is available at https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models#punctuation-models for example. Should be ready soon.

Was just about to mention this repo to the OP but suspect I found it from your site in the first place: https://github.com/benob/recasepunc :D

Punctuation/capitalization will make a massive difference to practical use! Look forward to it.

Reading my comment back, right here in the browser:

  > just open a max this program output like a keyboard and in
  > english at least it works really well i cannot believe it

The only problems that I see are:

1. Capitalization and punctuation.

2. Doesn't know what emacs is, so it got that wrong. A user-installed dictionary might help here.

3. "outputs" came out as "output". I just tried a few more times, and I got the same results. I suspect that like "emacs", the word "outputs" is not in the dictionary.

Regarding 1) I have 2 key bindings, 1 that starts a sentence and another binding but doesn't. while punctuation remains an issue (comers brackets and question marks for example) - since I'm mostly using this to save typing longer passages of text having to manually deal with punctuation isn't all that much of a hassle. But I can understand anyone attempting to go completely hands free would need something to support entering literal characters and punctuation.

How do the keybound scripts know when to stop listening? After a certain delay? Does the sentence-script just capitalize the first word and add a period to the end?

I'd love to see the scripts if you don't mind.

Just shortcuts to begin/end dictation.

Although I use a programmable keyboard, which I've configured to "push to talk", that is - I hold a key for dictation, releasing the case stops dictation.

I wonder if I could configure a shortcut such as Win-D (dictation) to start recording, and to poll the Win key to stop recording when it is released.

As long as you can run commands on key-press, I don't see why not.

You could test it with file creation/removal or something simple, the same will then work for nerd-dictation.

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