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Dictater: Replacement for OS X’s built-in speech services

10 points by arm 11y ago

natch 11y ago
Wow. This is definitely not a replacement as described, it is built on top of and is utterly dependent on OS X's built-in speech services. It does add some cool use cases, but far from "replacing" Apple speech services, they are all built using Apple Speech services... for example, enumerateSubstringsInRange:options:... has some deep mojo, handing sentence enumeration in many dozens of languages including ones where such enumeration is non-trival. The magic here is not in any way done by the author, who is just calling APIs given to him by Apple, APIs that encapsulate a tremendous amount of knowledge, while patting himself on the back here for his "replacement for OS X built-in speech services." And Apple doesn't even appear in the credits file. To say it is a replacement while standing on the shoulders of Apple speech technology, is amazingly disingenuous. And... to top it off, this is the weirdest way of open sourcing a Cocoa project I've ever seen: put it on github without an Xcode project file? What? Is the idea to claim credit for it being open source, while making it hard for most people to build the project? /rant
- reustle 11y ago
  Ah, that's unfortunate to hear. Are you aware of any projects that are in fact a replacement? I would love to be able to set up a little service locally on my machine where I could throw some text at some port over HTTP and it reads it out.
- elnosrac 11y ago
  Hey Natch, this is the author of Dictater. Thanks for the criticism, I'd like to address a few points: 1) You're right it's not a replacement for the backend speech service. It IS a replacement for Apple's front-end speech service which is what I intended to mean. I should probably clarify this. I'll also update the credits file. 2) I'll add the Xcode project file immediately. This was an oversight. Feel free to add an issue to the Github page if you have any other suggestions.

10 points by arm 11y ago

natch 11y ago

Wow. This is definitely not a replacement as described, it is built on top of and is utterly dependent on OS X's built-in speech services. It does add some cool use cases, but far from "replacing" Apple speech services, they are all built using Apple Speech services... for example, enumerateSubstringsInRange:options:... has some deep mojo, handing sentence enumeration in many dozens of languages including ones where such enumeration is non-trival. The magic here is not in any way done by the author, who is just calling APIs given to him by Apple, APIs that encapsulate a tremendous amount of knowledge, while patting himself on the back here for his "replacement for OS X built-in speech services." And Apple doesn't even appear in the credits file. To say it is a replacement while standing on the shoulders of Apple speech technology, is amazingly disingenuous. And... to top it off, this is the weirdest way of open sourcing a Cocoa project I've ever seen: put it on github without an Xcode project file? What? Is the idea to claim credit for it being open source, while making it hard for most people to build the project? /rant

reustle 11y ago
Ah, that's unfortunate to hear. Are you aware of any projects that are in fact a replacement? I would love to be able to set up a little service locally on my machine where I could throw some text at some port over HTTP and it reads it out.
elnosrac 11y ago
Hey Natch, this is the author of Dictater. Thanks for the criticism, I'd like to address a few points: 1) You're right it's not a replacement for the backend speech service. It IS a replacement for Apple's front-end speech service which is what I intended to mean. I should probably clarify this. I'll also update the credits file. 2) I'll add the Xcode project file immediately. This was an oversight. Feel free to add an issue to the Github page if you have any other suggestions.