Free speech and debate timekeeper software for linux

Speech Recognition HOWTO is a project that contains instructions for using speech recognition software and hardware and their use on Linux systems.
Enhancements:
- Changed license information (now GFDL) and added a new publication.

Speech::Recognizer::ViaVoice contains Perl wrappers for IBMs ViaVoice speech Recognizer library.

SYNOPSIS

use Speech::Recognizer::ViaVoice;
$| = 1;
if (0 == connectEngine) {
if ( 0 == defineVocab(myTestVocab, [hello,world,quit]) ) {
print please say "hello", "world", or "quit" at each prompt..., "n";

while (0 == startListening) {
print "speak> ";
if (0 == recognize) {
my ($s, $score) = (getWord, getScore);
if (defined($s)) {
printf "%s, score=%dn", $s, $score;
if ($s eq quit) {
exit 0;
}
} else {
printf "not recognized!n";
}
}
stopListening;
}
}

disconnectEngine;
}

This module provides very basic use of IBMs ViaVoice library (http://www-4.ibm.com/software/speech/enterprise/te_3.html) in perl. It allows its user to pass a list of speech commands for recognition in a perl list, connect to the engine, and request recognized spoken words. The most notable feature missing from the current version is the ability to select different ViaVoice users. I plan to add this functionality shortly, but for now you must use the default user.
Consult the ViaVoice documentation for ViaVoice setup. Most will probably just need to run vvstartuserguru, which requires a java runtime environment. Results will be better if you take the time to do a little training to your own voice in this utility.

You can use this perl module for reconition of words from IBMs vocab dictionary for your chosen locale without further preparation. To recognize words not available in the dictionary or to recognize phrases, you need to create a file with phonetic spellings for use by the provided script pronunciations.pl (installed in /usr/local/bin by default). This utility reads a text file whose name is supplied as its sole argument. The file should contain lines with two fields separated by a tab character:

Deborah --- TAB -->D EH B OW R AX
Deborah --- TAB -->D EH B AXR R AX
Axl Rose -- TAB -->AE K S AX L R OW Z

The text on the left is the word or phrase to be recognized, and the text on the right is a phonetic spelling of the format specified in the ViaVoice docs (section 3 of /usr/doc/ViaVoice/bpreadme.txt in my installation). As in the example, a word or phrase might have more than one common pronunciation. You can provide all of them, one on each line.

pronunciations.pl will most likely require super user privileges to write its output to files in the ViaVoice lib directory:

/usr/lib/ViaVoice/vocabs/langs/En_US/pools/

TimeTracker is an application loosely based on TimeKeeper, a Windows application used to track the time you spent on a task.

Being a Linux user and not willing to install Wine, I decided to hack my own version.

KTTS - KDE Text-to-Speech is a subsystem within the KDE desktop for conversion of text to audible speech.
KTTS is currently under development and aims to become the standard subsystem for all KDE applications to provide speech output.
Main features:
User Features:
- Speak any text from the KDE clipboard.
- Speak any plain text file.
- Speak all or any portion of a text file from Kate.
- Speak all or any portion of an HTML page from Konqueror.
- Use as the speech backend for KMouth and KSayIt.
- Speak KDE notifications (KNotify).
- Long text is parsed into sentences. User may backup by sentence or paragraph, replay, pause, and stop playing.
- Audio output via aRts or GStreamer (version 0.8.7 or later)
Programmer Features:
- Priority system for screen reader outputs, warnings and messages, while still playing regular texts.
- Plugin-based architecture for support of a wide variety of speech synthesis engines and drivers.
- Permit generation of speech from the command line (or via shell scripts) using the KDE DCOP utilities.
- Provide a lightweight and easily usable interface for applications to generate speech output.
- Applications need not be concerned about contention over the speech device.
- FUTURE: Provide support for speech markup languages, such as VoiceXML, Sable, Java Speech Markup Language (JSML), and Speech Markup Meta-language (SMML).
- FUTURE: Provide limited support for embedded speech markers.
- Asynchronous to prevent system blocking.