!VOICE CONTROL!

[sufi]

@gebgebgebgebgeb we salute you!

 

[sufi]

how many times did i whinge on about this

i am so fed up with mouse and keyboard though, aching and twisted, all the tendons and muscles developing knots and weird shapes from contorting around these weird shaped devices,constantly tangled in cables and frizzing from bluetooth, multiple bands of GHz wifi and phone snignals, always at the mercy of bandwidth, battery, reception, capacity,

crappy devices, even the slickest are like seamless cartoon computers, so i feel like they are just provisional, temporary, it's easy to imagine how shit this tech will look in retrospect - like primitive torture devices

our accelerated dematerialisation depending on this elaborate scaffolding of cables, pixels, nodes, software stacks all cobbled together, devoted to our little personal altars,

we really need to get past the crappy hardware we have now - all cables and charging and rsi

I predict that we'll look back at this era of delicate elaborate contraptions stringing together cables and wifi and screens and keyboards and spectacles like how we look at Heath Robinson,

and i guess some people can enjoy issuing commands to the computer by voice,
and it should be simple to configure a device that you can trust not to spy on you
i think it's good to talk to yr computer like its a dog

a lot

 

[sufi]

so this is what i believe the young people call "a thread"
🧵
3/x

 

[sufi]

i started looking for open source software to use my computer with voice control, and soon found myself floundering in a dismal quagmire of 10-15 years old abandonware

 

[sufi]

failed attempts to emulate alexa behaviour,
defunct project components and documentation too scattered to reconstitute into anything that works in 2023

 

[sufi]

firefox deleted their plugin a few years ago, so now there's no support for non-mouse users on ff. ffs
feels like they abandoned their users to chrome

 

[sufi]

appalled to see such a fundamental assistive tech need unmet in the free/libre/open source software universe, this era of corporate internet domination is merciless.

🔥 but then i discovered this one weird "app"...

 

[sufi]

it's not an app, it's just a program, niftily created recently, by a guy, a bloke, who has utilised the recent improvements in the technology to create almost exactly what i was looking for

Numen Voice Control

Voice control for handsfree computing

numenvoice.com

@gebgebgebgebgeb we salute you!

 

[sufi]

minimal documentation, no gui,

~geb/numen - Voice control for handsfree computing - sourcehut git

git.sr.ht

install via 1/2 a dozen incantations in the dark dark window of the command line interface 🔳 and then type the word "numen" and it runs,

 

[sufi]

and you start seeing things on your computer screen move about as you speak words as if talking to a dog
alt tab down, page down, tab,tab ...

 

[sufi]

with some concentration and clarity of enunciation you can do everything

Keyboard shortcuts - Perform common Firefox tasks quickly | Firefox Help

This is a list of Firefox keyboard shortcuts for working with tabs, bookmarks, searching the web, playing media files and more.

support.mozilla.org

logging in to the computer you really do feel like being in sci-fi

 

[sufi]

seems there's no need to be connected to the internet - the voice recognition takes place entirely on the local machine, so no sharing data, noone is listening

 

[sufi]

and of course none of that guff like what's the weather like old chap - no backchat no natural language processing

 

[sufi]

but very accurate, and can do voice to text words and sentences well, as well as individual keystrokes

i printed out all the words onto sheet of paper, real paper to hold in my hand as i talk to the computer

 

[sufi]

the natural language processing of course is the main gimmick of these so called ai, a shiny ux for search, and completely unnecessary for this use case.

the only feedback is inscrutable cyphers in the command prompt 🔳

 

[sufi]

⚡immediately you use it, it feels intuitively right and you start instinctively reaching for it
(even after you switched off the microphone to avoid randomly inserting gibberish/scrambling yr windows &/or accidentaly deleting the OS)

 

[sufi]

like the step forward from the appalling cheap tat of mouse and keyboard and so on
like what we (I) have been waiting for

 

[sufi]

the vocabulary is gamerish - probably possible to customise it, like a phonetic alphabet a semaphore, with words to spell out letters chosen for their distinctness instead of ay,bee,see,dee - air,bat,cap,drum - somewhat arbitrary maybe,

• do you know of any models for this type of communication?

 

[sufi]

er yeah its like this

Original Numen Screencast

Screencast of me using Numen Voice Control: https://numenvoice.com

peertube.tv

 

[sufi]

if you see what i mean? that is the voice of the mighty mighty @gebgebgebgebgebgeb themself

no more keyboard no more mouses 🔥