voice commands in gnome-shell?

[Ross Smith <myxiplx googlemail com>]

Hi folks,

I'm really liking the gnome-shell Actions menu & Workspaces idea, and
having heard about Breadcrumbs and Activities today, I'm liking it
even more.

However, one concern I have is that if I'm working with a bunch of
programs, and opening them on various workspaces, to keep activities
grouped together, I'm going to need to make sure I name workspaces
appropriately, and that I keep on top of renaming them as I finish one
task and move to another.

And that goes double if I want to be able to use Zeitgeist later on to
browse for all the files and programs I used in an activity.

Now, I've tried the approach of naming workspaces before with gnome,
and gave up on it after just half a day.  The hassle of clicking the
workspace name, typing a new name, etc was just too disruptive to my
flow of work.  My workspaces are now 1, 2, 3 and 4, and I just have to
remember which tasks I have on each.

However, I think it would be a lot easier if you could name workspaces
on the fly, and that's where I think voice commands could be useful.

Now, I'm no huge fan of using voice for everything, but it does has
one big advantage over everything else - it doesn't interrupt your use
of the computer, and that seems to fit in well with the limitations I
had before naming workspaces.

If I could just sit there working, and say at any point "name
workspace:  development", and watch the workspace name in the panel
change I would be a very happy man.  There's no need for it to grab
focus, it can do it all in the background, and that means I don't need
to interrupt what I'm doing.  It's potentially going to make it a lot
easier to track things by activity, because it's now incredibly easy
to label an activity.

I can think of a few other times it might be nice to have voice control too:

In overlay mode:
"new workspace"  - why move the mouse all the way to the right to add
a workspace when you could just say this at any time?  There's no
reason this couldn't work even while dragging a program or document.

In general use:
"name workspace ....." - should happen completely in the background
"switch to ....." - to swap to another workspace
"show workspaces" - full screen (compiz scale like) view of workspaces
"show programs" - full screen view of programs on this workspace
"find program ...." - might be handy to find a program you've lost on
some workspace somewhere :)

By focusing voice control on workspace management tasks, you make
voice control relatively simple, and integrate workspaces even more
seamlessly into the flow of the UI.

Ross