Re: voice commands in gnome-shell?

[Mike Bursell <mike hingston demon co uk>]

In addition to Ross' interesting ideas on voice commands, I'd like to
put in a plea for non-mouse work as well.  There are situations = and
hardware, such as laptop or netbook use - where moving my hands to the
mouse or trackpad slows me down significantly.  So, can we support the
following?

1. mouse, or mouse + some keyboard
2. keyboard only for all standard operations
3. voice commands for all or some standard operations?

-Mike.

On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 13:00 +0100, Ross Smith wrote:
> 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
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