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Hi, I’m the sole developer behind Talon. It’s not open source for several reasons, one of which is that I work on it full time, live on my savings, and give it

Hi, I’m the sole developer behind Talon. It’s not open source for several reasons, one of which is that I work on it full time, live on my savings, and give it away for free (because the best thing I can get out of releasing Talon is reducing hand pain in others at scale, not money). It has eye/head tracking, noise recognition, and an extremely advanced scripting engine, so it’s not just a speech recognition project. It also might come to Linux sooner than you think. It doesn’t depend on Dragon at all, and Nuance dropping support for Dragon 6 isn’t a huge problem yet as long as you can still buy it (Talon has a builtin speech engine, and also fixes/works around most of the long-standing problems in Dragon Mac, and I’m probably more able to help with problems than their support). Integrating more engines is on the roadmap, but slightly after multi platform support (since there’s already a good free engine on Mac). Let me know if you have any questions or if there’s anything I can do to make Talon work better for your use case. It’s also worth reading back through my HN comments as I’ve talked in detail about Talon there.

melling 8y ago
How good is Talon’s speech recognition? It would be nice to have a better native Mac solution.
- lunixbochs 8y ago
  Well, even when using it with Dragon, Talon only uses the speech recognition part. So you get Dragon’s recognition accuracy but don’t need to worry about most of the bugs. The builtin engine is a much nicer experience than Dragon (very fast startup, no config), but simply isn’t as good at recognizing English, and there’s also a weird behavior in it I haven’t worked around yet that makes it harder to mix English with commands (it greedily prioritizes commands sometimes). The accuracy is quite good for American accents at least. I found it to be consistently more accurate than wav2letter (haven’t tried ++) and DeepSpeech with some simple test audio.

melling 8y ago

How good is Talon’s speech recognition? It would be nice to have a better native Mac solution.

lunixbochs 8y ago
Well, even when using it with Dragon, Talon only uses the speech recognition part. So you get Dragon’s recognition accuracy but don’t need to worry about most of the bugs. The builtin engine is a much nicer experience than Dragon (very fast startup, no config), but simply isn’t as good at recognizing English, and there’s also a weird behavior in it I haven’t worked around yet that makes it harder to mix English with commands (it greedily prioritizes commands sometimes). The accuracy is quite good for American accents at least. I found it to be consistently more accurate than wav2letter (haven’t tried ++) and DeepSpeech with some simple test audio.