Re: voice commands in gnome-shell?

[Ross Smith <myxiplx googlemail com>]

Actually, having done a little more reading (and discovered Hamster),
I'd like to possibly refine the voice-command idea a little.  How does
this sound?

"Voice commands should primarily be used for managing activities."

That would cover basic workspace management as mentioned above, and
possibly activity creation, and activity time tracking.

You then have:
- voice commands to set up activities & workspaces on the fly
- the Actions menu to start the programs you need (and assign them to
workspaces / activities
- hamster to keep track of what you're doing (largely based on the
currently active activity / workspace)

Ross




On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Mike Bursell <mike hingston demon co uk> wrote:
> 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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>
>