Talon – Powerful hands-free input | Hacker News Reader

Talon – Powerful hands-free input

talonvoice.com

I've always had hands-free/voice programming in the back of my mind. I love the build software and code, and I'd hate to lose that ability due to blindness or lack of dexterity.

But I wouldn't consider this (or any other) proprietary software on the face of it - this feels like the sort of area where open source is tablestakes to me. If only due to NixOS lol.

Feel free to correct me if I misunderstood. I couldn't find the source from the website, and the github seems to be just for issue tracking?

The EULA makes it very clear that this is not open/free software.

That's what I thought. My only qualm was I found an old reddit comment calling it "open source."

Sharing my own experience because this helped me through a very tough time in life.

I used this for about 2 years when I couldn't use my hands much to do all my course work in my cs degree.

I coded, dictated math and even controlled my mouse through the eye tracker integration. The community around talon is great and development speed is very fast. The speed of improvement is also rapid, it was astounding how accurately I could dictate code, and the lead developer aegis would only push out more improvements to increase accuracy. He will also routinely push out niche features for people with very specific accessibility needs.

The software is free but there is an option to pay that gets you into some beta release channels. I'd encourage anyone who cares to contribute to the development costs.

I am a Patreon contributor to the project. I have to take issue with the 'development speed is very fast' -- there have been no new releases (unless I am mistaken - and this is what the built in app upgrade functionality tells me, I am 0.2.1) in a long time, > 8 months I think.

I also find the speech recognition especially poor for my RP English accent; Aegis says that his training has included UK English, but I suspect the training data has a strong US bias.

I am about to cancel my Patreon support given the lack of updates, communications, and the fact that Aegis' time is clearly spread thin, and afaik he has not taken on any additional staff despite it being on his agenda for a year or so.

I would love to be proven wrong, and discover that I have somehow fallen into a release blackhole. I fully accept that I may have stumbled in the whole talon website/patreon/discourse mire.

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