Re: [gnome-love] GSoC-2013: Idea for GNOME

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

Hi Varad.

Thanks so much for your interest!

On 03/02/2013 04:52 AM, Varad Gautam wrote:
> Hi! I'm currently a student in India, and am interested in participating in
> GSoC-2013. I had this idea for my project:
>
> I'd like to work on a speech-integration system for GNOME

This is definitely a much-needed area of work. But...

> I know about GnomeVoiceControl, which was also created as a GSoC idea

And subsequently abandoned, a number of years ago. It is not GNOME 3
compatible. So before anything else is done, getting GNOME Voice Control
using/working with current libraries would be required. After all,
investing time on adding new features to something that is "GNOME" in
name only [1] doesn't seem like a good investment of one's time.

The other two factors worth considering are:

1. Who will be your mentor? (The accessibility team doesn't have anyone
   with solid expertise in speech recognition technologies.)

2. Simon (for KDE) already does many of the things you propose adding to
   GNOME Voice Control. And it is still an active project. I wonder if
   it would be possible to get Simon more desktop-environment agnostic
   and/or create a new module for GNOME based on the Simon libraries.
   (I honestly don't know how much work this would entail, or if it is
   even doable. If memory serves me, Simon has Qt used pretty heavily
   throughout its entire codebase. But you'd need to check with Peter
   Grasch to be sure. If Peter tells you this is totally doable and is
   willing to mentor you on the speech-recognition side of things, we
   could mentor you on the GNOME side.

On a related note, Simon also started out as a student project and has
since participated in GSoC.

Hope this helps. Take care.
--joanie

[1] https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/festlang-gvc/2011-May/000079.html