Voice control over desktop environment

Gnome-Voice-Control

Developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2007, this was an idea to develop some features that will improve the usability in the Gnome Desktop.

The goal is to implement a Desktop Voice Control System. The system consists in an application that will be monitoring the audio input(microphone) and when a significant audio signal has been detected, the software catches, processes and recognizes the signal and then executes the desired action over the Gnome Desktop. In a set of actions could include maximize, minimize, close the active window; open a specific program; switching from one desktop to another; among others. GnomeVoiceControl is implemented in C in conjunction with CMU Sphinx, which is an open source tool, created to convert speech to text.

Slide-show by the authors

Unfortunately it looks like it has not developed much beyond the basic "goals" - however there does appear to be some activity adding support for new languages such as Bulgarian and Turkish this year.

To install:

sudo apt-get install gnome-voice-control

Platypus

There is an interesting looking project call platypus - basically is a linux front-end to Dragon Naturally Speaking which runs in Wine.

The claim-to-fame for this application is "it can even launch Windows or Linux programs and scripts, e.g. "start terminal".

VEDICS

This is a newish project that says it works with the Unity interface.

The project page says it recognises "run [program name]" - so in theory you [program name] could be any script you want to run.

Simon Listens

This is an open source project aimed to replace mouse and/or keyboard by speech recognition initially developed for physically disabled people.

There is a ppa from where we can install the application: ppa:grasch-simon-listens/simon