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authorBlaine Mooers <bmooers1@gmail.com>2023-12-04 13:10:20 -0600
committerBlaine Mooers <bmooers1@gmail.com>2023-12-04 13:10:20 -0600
commit5cb970ee7b92483f67288f29027afa437c7026d7 (patch)
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parentb5e397f1bedea9705b9705f167b98f03b6249695 (diff)
downloademacsconf-wiki-5cb970ee7b92483f67288f29027afa437c7026d7.tar.xz
emacsconf-wiki-5cb970ee7b92483f67288f29027afa437c7026d7.zip
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diff --git a/2023/talks/voice.md b/2023/talks/voice.md
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@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ I also supply the interactive quizzes for mastering the basic Voice In commands
I learned the Talon alphabet in one day by taking the quiz at spaced intervals.
The quiz took only 60 seconds to complete when I was proficient.
-About the speaker:
+# About the speaker:
I am an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of
Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. I use X-ray crystallography to study
@@ -60,6 +60,223 @@ stress injury flared up while entering data in a spreadsheet. I
tripled my daily word count by using the speech-to-text, and I get a
kick out of running remote computers by speech-to-command.
+# Transcript
+
+[slide 1]
+Hi, I'm Blaine Mooers. I'm an associate professor of biochemistry at
+ the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City.
+ My lab studies the role of RNA structure in RNA editing. We use X-ray
+ crystallography to study the structures of these RNAs. We spend a lot
+ of time in the lab preparing our samples for structural studies, and then
+ we also spend a lot of time at the computer analyzing the resulting data.
+ I was seeking ways of using voice computing to try to enhance
+ my productivity.
+
+[slide 2]
+I divide voice computing into three activities, speech-to-text or dictation,
+speech-to-commands, and speech-to-code. I'll be talking about
+speech-to-text and speech-to-commands today because these are two
+activities that are probably most broadly applicable to the workflows of
+people attending this conference.
+
+[slide 3]
+This talk will not be about Emacspeak. This is a venerated program for
+converting text to speech. We're talking about the flow of information in
+the opposite direction, speech-to-text. We need an Emacs Listens. We
+don't have one, so I had to seek help from outside the Emacs world via
+ the Voice In Plus. This runs in the Google Chrome web browser, and it's
+ very good for speech-to-text and very easy to learn how to use. It also
+ has some speech-to-commands. However, Talon Voice is much better
+ with the speech-to-commands, and it's also great at speech-to-code.
+
+[slide 4]
+the motivations are, obviously, as I mentioned already, for improved
+productivity. So, if you're a fast typist who types faster than they can speak,
+then nonetheless you might still benefit from voice computing when you
+grow tired of using the keyboard. On the other hand, you might be a
+slow typist who talks faster than they can type. In this case, you're
+definitely going to benefit from dictation because you'll be able to encode
+more words in text documents in a given day. If you're a coder,
+then you may get a kick out of opening programs and websites and
+coding projects by using your voice.
+
+[slide 5]
+Then there are health-related reasons. You may have impaired use
+of your hands, eyes, or both due to accident or disease, or you may
+suffer from a repetitive stress injury. Many of us have this in a mild
+but chronic form of it. We can't take a three-month sabbatical from
+the keyboard without losing our jobs, so these injuries tend to persist.
+And then you may have learned that it's not good for your health to
+sit for prolonged periods of time with your staring at a computer screen.
+You can actually dictate to your computer from 20 feet away while
+looking out the window, thereby giving your lower body a break
+and your eyes a break.
+
+[slide 5]
+I'm not God, so I have to bring data. I have two data points here,
+the number of words that I wrote in June and July this year and in
+September and October. I adopted the use of voice computing in
+the middle of August. As you can see, I got an over three-fold increase
+ in my output.
+
+[slide 6]
+So this is the Chrome store website for voice-in. It's only available
+for Google Chrome. You just hit the install button to install it. To configure it,
+you need to select a language. It has support for 40 languages and
+it supports about a dozen different dialects of English, including Australian.
+
+[slide 7]
+It works on web pages with text areas, so it works. I use it regularly on
+Overleaf and 750words.com, a distraction-free environment for writing.
+ It also works in webmails. It works in Google. It works in Jupyter Lab,
+ of course, because that runs in the browser. It also works in Jupyter
+ Notebook and Colab Notebook. It should work in Cloudmacs. I've
+ mapped option-L to opening Voice In when the cursor is on a web page
+ that has a text area. The presence of a text area is the main limiting factor.
+
+[slide 8]
+Voice In has a number of built-in commands. You can turn it off by saying
+"stop dictation". It doesn't distinguish between a command mode and
+a dictation mode. It has undo command. When you use the command
+"copy that" to a copy of selection. You say "press enter" to issue a
+command or submit text that has been written in a web form, and then
+"press tab" will open up the next tab in a web browser. The scroll up
+and down will allow you to navigate a web page. I've put together a quiz
+about these commands so that you can go through this quiz several
+times until you get at least 90 percent of them correct, 90 percent of
+the questions correct. In order to boost your recall of the commands,
+I have a Python script that you can probably pound through the quiz
+with in less than a minute, once you know the commands. I also
+provide an Elisp version of this quiz, but it's a little slower to operate.
+
+[slide 9]
+These are some common errors that I've run into with Voice In. It
+likes to contract statements like "I will" into "I'll". Contractions are not
+used in formal writing, and most of my writing is formal writing, so
+this annoys me. I will show you how I corrected for that problem. It
+also drops the first word in sentences quite often. This might be some
+speech issue that I have. It inserts the wrong word because it's not
+in the dictionary that was used to train it. So, for example, the word
+PyMOL is the name of a molecular graphics program that we use in
+our field. It doesn't recognize PyMOL. Instead, it substitutes in the
+word "primal". Since I don't use "primal" very often, I've mapped the
+word "primal" to "PyMOL" in some custom commands I'll talk about
+in a minute. Then there's a problem that the commands that exist might
+get executed when you speak them when, in fact, you wanted to use
+the words in those commands during your dictation. So this is a problem,
+a pitfall of Voice In, in that it doesn't have a command mode that's
+separate from a dictation mode.
+
+[slide 10]
+You can set up through a very easy-to-use GUI custom voice
+commands mapped to what you want inserted, so this is how
+misinterpreted words can be corrected. You just map the misinterpreted
+word to the intended word. You can also map the contractions to their
+expansions. I did this for 94 English contractions, and you can find
+these on GitHub. You can also insert acronyms and expand those
+acronyms. I apply the same approach to the first names of colleagues.
+I say "expand Fred", for example, to get Fred's first and last name
+with the correct spelling of his very long German name. You can also
+insert other trivia like favorite URLs. You can insert LaTeX snippets.
+It handles correctly multi-line snippets. You just have to enclose them
+in double quotes. You can even insert BibTeX cite keys for references
+that you use frequently. All fields have certain key references for certain
+methods or topics.
+
+[slide 11]
+Then it has a set of commands that you can customize for the purpose
+of speech-to-commands to get the computer to do something like open
+up a specific website or save the current writing. In this case, we have
+"press: command-s" for saving the current writing. You can change the
+language with "lang:", and you can change the case of the text with "case:".
+
+[slide 12]
+But the speech-to-command repertoire is quite limited in Voice In,
+so it's now time to pick up on Talon Voice. This is an open source project.
+It's free. It is highly configurable via TalonScript, which is a subset of
+Python. You can use either TalonScript or Python to configure it, but it's
+easier to code up your configuration in TalonScript. It has a Python
+interpreter embedded in it, so you don't have to mess around with
+installing yet another Python interpreter. It runs on all platforms, and it
+has a dictation mode that's separate from a command mode. You can
+activate it, and it'll be in a listening state asleep. You just bark out
+"Talon Wake" to start to wake it up, and "Talon Sleep" to have it go into
+a listening state. It has a very welcoming community in the Talon Slack
+channel. Then I need to point out that there's several packages that
+others have developed that run on top of Talon, but one of particular note
+is by Pokey Rule. He has on his website some really well-done videos
+that demonstrate how he uses Cursorless to move the cursor around
+using voice commands. This, however, runs on VS Code. At least that's
+the text editor for which he's primarily developing Cursorless.
+
+[slide 13]
+I followed the install protocol outlined by Tara Roys. She has a collection
+of tutorials on YouTube as well as on GitHub that are quite helpful. I
+followed her tutorial for installing Talon on macOS without any issues,
+but allow for half an hour to an hour to go through the process. When
+you're done, you'll have this Talon icon appear in the toolbar on the Mac.
+When it has this diagonal line across it, that means it's in the sleep state.
+So, this leads to cascading pull-down menus. This is it for the GUI. One
+of your first tasks is to select a language model that will be used to
+interpret the sounds that you generate as words. And the other kind of
+key feature is that there's a, under scripting, there's a view log pull-down
+that opens up a window displaying the log file. Whenever you make a
+change in a Talon configuration file, that change is implemented
+immediately. You do not have to restart Talon to get the change
+to take effect.
+
+[slide 14]
+This is an example of a Talon file. It has two components. It has a header
+above the dash that describes the scope of the commands contained
+below the dash. Each command is separated by a blank line. If a voice
+command is mapped to multiple actions, these are listed separately on
+indented lines below the first line. The words that are in square brackets
+are optional. So, I have mapped the word toggle voice in, or the phrase
+toggle voice in, to the keyboard shortcut Alt L in order to toggle on or off
+voice in. If I toggle voice in on, I need to immediately toggle off Talon,
+and this is done through this key command for Control T, which is
+mapped to speech toggle. Speech toggle. Then there are, there's a
+couple other examples. So, if there's no header present, it's an optional
+feature of Talon files, then the commands in the file will apply in all
+situations, in all modes.
+
+[slide 15]
+Here we have two restrictions. These commands will only work when
+using the iTerm2 terminal emulator for the Mac, and then only when the
+title of the window in ccc has this particular address, which is what
+appears when I've logged into the supercomputer at the University of
+Oklahoma. One of the commands in this file is checkjobs. It's mapped
+to an alias, a bash alias called cj for "check jobs", which in turn is mapped
+to a script called checkjobs.sh that, when it's run, returns a listing of the
+pending and running jobs on the supercomputer in a format that I find
+pleasing. This backslash n after cj, the new line character, enters the
+command, so I don't have to do that as an additional step. Likewise,
+here's a similar setup for interacting with a Ubuntu virtual machine.
+
+[slide 16]
+In terms of picking up voice computing, these are my recommendations.
+You're going to run into more errors than you may like initially, and so
+you need some patience in dealing with those. And also, it'll take you
+a while to get your head wrapped around Talon and how it works. You'll
+definitely want to use custom commands to correct the errors or
+shortcomings of the language models. And you've seen how, by
+opening up projects by voice commands, you can reduce friction in
+terms of restarting work on a project. You've seen how Voice In is
+preferred for more accurate dictation. I think my error rate is about
+1 to 2 percent. That is, 1 to 2 out of 100 words are incorrect versus
+Talon Voice where I think the error rate is closer to 5 percent. I have
+put together a library of Enlgish contractions and their expansion for
+Talon too, and they can be found here on GitHub. And I also have posted
+a quiz of 600 questions about some basic Talon commands.
+
+[slide 17]
+I'd like to thank the people who've helped me out on the Talon Slack
+channel and members of the Oklahoma Data Science Workshop where
+I gave an hour-long talk on this topic several weeks ago. I'd like to thank
+my friends at the Berlin and Austin Emacs Meetup and at the M-x research
+Slack channel. And I thank these grant funding agencies for supporting
+my work. I'll be happy to take any questions.
+
[[!inline pages="internal(2023/info/voice-after)" raw="yes"]]
[[!inline pages="internal(2023/info/voice-nav)" raw="yes"]]