Speech to Text / Virtual keyboard in NixOS

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1

Due to an accident, I’m temporarily down to one usable arm which makes my typing rather slow. Wondering if someone has some form of speech-to-text for text entry done in NixOS. I’ve found stt but it seems rather bare and just a component of a workable solution. I’d possibly imagine like a virtual keyboard or hotkey, then I say my stuff, and then the recognized text gets typed like a virtual keyboard. Also open for other suggestions. I can do config changes but anything that still requires a lot of experimentation is out of the picture for practicability reasons.

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I tried packaging three different tools but I was not impressed by either of them:

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In general there is talon, which I managed to package in an earlier version, though not the current one. Though the old version isn’t available anymore.

It’s much more than just TTS, but a full command engine and can therefore be used for programming as well.

If someone manages to package it stably, I’d like to hear more about it!

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I found Talon as well. Managed to get a current version to run using steam-run. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of wrong detections and sometimes trying to correct using my voice makes everything worse. However using my remaining hand to control cursor and special keys is quite a good combination and also quite fast. I will play around with this some more and see if I am actually faster than typing one handed. Will definitely try to create a Nix package for this once I’m back to two typing hands.

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What is the status of this. I would be interested in using nerd-dictation, but haven’t got the first clue how to get it installed.

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Someone needs to adopt the package and create a PR against Nixpkgs, addressing the review comments.