Hello, for those of you that do not yet know me, my name is Peter Grasch and I currently maintain the Simon project (http://simon.kde.org), a speech recognition project in KDE's extragear.
Over the course of the summer, I have been working on bringing dictation capabilities to Simon (more info & demo video: http://grasch.net/node/22). Now, I'm trying to build up a network of developers and researchers that work together on building high accuracy, large vocabulary speech recognition systems for a variety of domains (desktop dictation being one of them). Building such systems using free software and free resources requires a lot of work in many different areas (software development, signal processing, linguistics, etc.). In order to facilitate collaboration and to establish a sustainable community between volunteers of such diverse backgrounds, I am convinced that the right organizational structure is crucial to ensuring continued long-term success. Naturally, as a KDE contributer, I would like to launch this project as part of KDE. I talked to quite a number of the people who expressed interest in taking up an active role in this effort, and this is what we would like to propose: * A new category in KDE's extragear called "Speech" (putting it on the same level as e.g., "Network"). Rationale: Not all speech recognition applications are necessarily related to accessibility (e.g., lecture transcription) and splitting up the projects in different categories would hinder collaboration. * Creating the "open speech group" (name still a work in progress) and setting up a project page for it. This would serve as little else than a common label for all projects that are part of the initiative - basically the equivalent of "KDE Multimedia Team" but for speech instead of multimedia. Rationale: A common brand makes it easier to market and represent the collective effort of all sub-projects. I've obviously read the KDE manifesto carefully and I think that such a group would be in line with the overall spirit, even though there are some details that I feel the need to point out explicitly: Some of the sub-projects may not necessarily be about end-user software or even software at all (e.g., speech modeling). However, please keep in mind that this is a sub-project of a larger initiative that is very much about end-user software; splitting the speech modeling in a separate project just makes sense because it's an ambitious project in it's own right. Some of sub projects may appear to diverge from "established practices" (by not using C++, for example) but that is mostly because there won't be any similar KDE projects (for example, somebody is already working on a web-based transcriber system based on ruby on rails) or "special considerations" (e.g., an application for Mac OS X may use the native toolkit because the KDE infrastructure for OS X is not sufficiently mature). I'm posting this here on the community list because I want to hear your thoughts on the proposal. Do you think that the 'open speech group' would fit within KDE? Best regards, Peter _______________________________________________ kde-community mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
