 like my plastic lawnmower pretty cool ain't it. Today I'm just going to talk and hopefully you guys are going to listen. As you know I love free and open source software and almost everything I do on my computer and my phone can be done with free and open source software but there are times in places where free and open source software falls short. Now I'm going to talk about one of those today. There's a few places but the one place I really feel like the open source community could really focus their efforts and it's not an easy thing and I understand that is voice to text to where I can talk and the computer type something. You know we do this all time at least most people on their phones and we all know that you know there's a privacy concern there and to me privacy is important. It's not the most important thing when it comes to software but privacy is important and you know every time you talk to your phone whether it be an iPhone or Android phone or even you know using your voice search on something like Chrome or in a web browser or you're doing voice to text inside your web browser you're using services either you know on your iPhone you're using Apple services or on your Android phone or Chrome browser you're using Google services and your voice is being recorded and streamed up to their server and it's spitting back text which then applies stuff too whether it's a google search or just typing into your browser or whatever and those are great and you can use those services. I actually have a shopping list on my phone that I created that me and my wife use and where we can type in item a store name comma and then some items divided by commas and it will create a list for different stores for us and I added in a voice to text feature which uses you know Google services which is nice and obviously a software I wrote is free and open source and it's serving it up to the server where it's using proprietary software to translate it which to me isn't horrible in a sense uh because the software isn't running on my machine I'm not going to get into the whole software as a service thing but it'd be really nice to be able to do that on my machine fully open source and not have to worry about my voice going up to a server you know what's really neat I should have looked up but if you go log into your google account if you have a google account and you have an android phone you can go into your history settings and this is one thing I will say I like about google say what you want as far as them being bad and evil and collecting data yeah we all know they collect data on us but at the same time you get you can pull your data back too and you can go into your history and you can actually see a list of every time you've talked to your phone and you've said the I don't even want to say I don't know if it'll work while I'm voice while I'm recording a video let's say okay google okay my my phone didn't do it okay google or hey google um or just press the button and talk into your phone you can see and it has a list it has the text of what you said and you can press play and hear yourself talking and you actually when you press play you actually hear the few seconds before you even say okay google because you know it's constantly recording to you so you know your phone is constantly listening to you which a lot of people don't like but I would like just like in general to have an application that's easy to use for voice to text and you know when you try to google this sort of thing there's a few projects show up there's one called Sphinx that's been around for a long time I've never been able to get that thing to work I even come close all I want is an executable that I can pipe you know an audio file into and it translates to text and obviously does some grammar correction to make sure that if I say there it knows which there there is which it could be two separate programs it could spit out what it thinks you're saying and then you can have a separate program that tries to do the grammar correction I can see those being two different things um and I understand this a difficult thing because it takes a lot of voice samples to to develop something like that I don't know if a lot of you remember back in the day back in the early days I don't know it might even be it was before I had an android phone was back when I had a flip phone you could do google uh uh one 800 google 411 and uh it was a 401 service where you can go and you can ask questions it's all voice activated and you would say looking for a pizza joint in napal's florida and it would give you a list and would say them to you and you'd be like I like number one more details on number one it would give you more details and you can be like text me directions and it would text you directions it wasn't a smartphone it was an old flip phone um smartphones existed at the time or at least during the time I don't know when this when google 401 first came out um and people were saying at the time google's collecting voice samples because they're building a voice text and that may have been well what they're doing and you know with your android phone as you talk you know it's learning what you're saying and they're actually you used to be able to correct things it said and it would ask I don't know if it still does uh because I had my my google account so far so long um you would you would say you know it said you want to personalize it and basically it would learn your voice a little bit better but it's taking samples so the more people who are using android phones and google services the better their voice recognition you get and same with apple that more people who are using the iphone's talk the better it's just constantly going to be getting better and that's kind of a hard thing to to get uh when you're not submitting stuff so part of the the point of the whole open source uh you know project like that would be so that you're not sending your stuff to a server uh so what's the solution for that well I think back to the late 90s and a product that still exists is called dragon speak which was a pretty cool program uh for windows you would talk and it would type and it had a whole editor that you can move you know word document editor that you can use your voice with and you can actually even one of the things I thought was real cool about was you could say uh mouse grid and it would divide the screen up into nine squares and you would say the number of screw you want it would divide that up into nine squares and it would you keep doing that until you move the night the the mouse cursor all the way around so you want you can say mouse double click and it would click so I mean you didn't need to use hands at all it was completely hands free if you wanted to control your whole computer that way didn't work that great if you were listening to music or had any type of noise in the background but it was pretty cool but one of the ways you train that program so it came and it was already knew some voices but it would have stories and paragraphs that you would read as the words highlighted and it would learn your voice from that so I would like to see the open source community work on a voice text thing and then have an optional thing it'll be great if big distros like like Ubuntu or Linux Mint or I guess elementary is a new big one people are talking about but when you start it up be like hey would you like to contribute and you know read this paragraph and let you know that it's going to be sitting off to a server so we can start collecting so it could build this database and get better but I also know that even if we did that the database is going to be pretty large to have on all your devices maybe so be nice if that you could set up your own personal server that you can train and pull down the the the databases that they have on their servers but you can also train it for your voice in particular and so that my phone or other devices don't need to have the full database itself but just have a client just like Google does but locally on your own private server and of course people can can do their own services using it as well but to be able to run on your own server is part of the goal too you know and I think that would be awesome way out of my league as far as programming I can't help with this at all but if an open source project did that I would read all the stories they tell me to read and I'm a horrible reader but I read every story they would have me read to help train that I would be as much contribute as much as I could that way and I really wish we could see that and I don't even even at first I don't care if it's real time so like like I don't remember back when Android first started you would speak and you would say your whole sentence and then there would be a pause and it would wait while upload that file basically I mean it would all happen without you haven't do anything but it would upload what you said and then it would give you a response sentence where nowadays it's kind of doing it real time it's streaming your voice and it's changing the the what you're typing or what you're saying as it types it on the screen but I'd be fine with with having to you know record a whole wave file and then pipe it into a file although with like a socks package you can you know pipe audio from your microphone directly into you know socks and process it so you should be able to do something like that but I wouldn't care if I had to record stuff to a wave file and then run it through the program because I could script that out and yeah it might not top type while I'm talking but I could talk and then when I'm done talking have it translate and it would approve from there so anyway again the point of what I'm talking about here is that there are some areas where I feel like free and open source software is lacking and I really feel like someone who knows what they're doing and has the ability to start a project I mean if I had any any clue where to start on how to write software like that I would but supposedly the Sphinx software is a starting point but I would really like to see them create something that's easy to use an executable that I could pipe audio into and it translates it even if it's a poor translation then you have to run it through some sort of again grammar correction to get proper translations and then turning that into you know some sort of socket or something that I can or even even using you know HTTP which I know a lot of people are gonna are gonna say it's a horrible idea but like basically if I could grab a wave file and use W get to upload that to a server and it responds with the voice text which I used to be able to do and you know I think they've changed things but you still do shell scripts like that with the Google services where you would uh you know I would talk it would pipe it in the socks convert it to a certain format of wave upload it with W get or whatever and then it would return it uh you know the text sentence of what you said that would be a great starting point but to have it be able to run on my own server or at least have servers somewhere that can train and then you can start your own server based on what they collect um but the hardest part of this is again uh training your voice which you could do personalized training like uh like the dragon speak used to do or you could do um uh I just lost my train of thought um where we do read and submit to a server and people could as an option can help we can create this community database so that just learns everyone's voice rather than individual voices um so let me know what you guys think uh is this important to you because it seems important to me because it it is something that people do daily on their phones using these services but there's really not an open source alternative again you can write your own scripts that use those services and at least the software running on my machine is free and open source but it's using these non-free services um which uh is you know for people who are privacy conscious is a privacy concern yeah I want to hear what you guys think sorry if the videos get my arms are getting tired holding my phone here um I was just trying to relax I wasn't planning on making this video it just kind of popped into my head it's something I've thought about a lot there's there like I said there are those few niche areas where I feel like the open source community could do a better job and this is definitely one of them let me know what you think down in the comments uh like share subscribe visit my website uh talk to you guys soon have a great day all that stuff bye