@NatalyaD @xanna @kittyboy77

I'm using Talon for speech to text on Linux now.

It can do a ton of other voice-control stuff too, potentially in conjunction with an eye tracker or pedals, so you don't necessarily need to use your hands whatsoever. In using it purely for dictation, I'm only really scratching the surface of its capabilities.

You have to be at least a little bit techie to get it up and running, and you pretty much have to be on the Slack if you need any help. I wouldn't be surprised if the documentation improved in future - it's early days yet and the developer is clearly working hard on the software itself. Meanwhile he does answer questions impressively fast on the Slack, as do some power users.

(There _is_ a fair amount of documentation already, inc for abundant customisation options - but it's not at all beginner-level. My heart sinks at the amount of background reading I'd need to do to understand it! So I've done very little customising so far.)

The speech model is imported, and unlike Dragon, it doesn't try to train itself from you correcting your text: it only changes interpretation via being explicitly told stuff, to the effect of e.g. "this name exists" or "what you've been guessing as bleep should be blorp". After about a month of adding new correction-instructions to it, and me getting used to it, I was finding it reasonably comparable to Dragon in terms of dictation accuracy.

I actually kind of prefer Talon to Dragon now, because my Dragon would crash a lot, which outweighed some of its bells and whistles, and Talon's been really stable. And I like the clarity of the correction-instructions (even if they don't _always_ catch what I meant) versus the trying to "train" Dragon on things it might or might not learn to get.

Talon's not compatible with Wayland, and, I gather, won't ever be, because Wayland intrinsically doesn't support the way it works. So you need a Linux distro which can do the older one, ISTR it's called X or X-something. As I understand it, this factor could be a question-mark over Talon's long-term future on Linux, depending on how long the older one remains supported (or substitutable). Can't forecast that aspect because I don't fully understand the relevant Linux landscape.

I'm still on the free version of Talon, and there's a paid beta with more things and integrations, including being able to teach it a variety of pops and clicks and suchlike!

HTH

#Talon

@mancavgeek

Yeah, I've got my laptop running LMDE now (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and it's mostly pretty nice.

I did run into some things while installing that you'd have to be techie to get past. There was a thing with Secure Boot and a thing with a WiFi card, where I had to resort to trawling forums and blogs for other people's solutions.

But since it's actually been up and running, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to an ordinary person for all the normal kind of stuff.

Dragon (speech to text) had been the last thing keeping it on Windows, because these days my fingers get iffy if I type too much. I did think beforehand that I might have to keep that going on top of a virtual machine. However, Talon seemed worth a try, in its dictation mode. And after a couple of months of adding to my corrections file and getting used to its conventions, I reckon I'm just as fast on that as I used to be on Dragon.

Still need Win or Mac if I want to run Dorico (sheet music creation). That's not an everyday task for me, so doesn't have to be on the laptop.

#Linux #LMDE #Dragon #Talon #software