Voice dialling
 

OK, so the N900 lacks voice dialling. It's partly understandable as it developed from a non-phone internet tablet, and on the other hand I find it appalling coming from the world's largest mobile phone maker. So it seems Nokia is handing this over to the user community to develop. My question as a total Maemo newbie is, how likely will that be? I'd like to see a bluetooth ear-piece enabled voice dialling capability.

PS. I created a poll on the subject DS.

Re: Voice dialling
 

I'm not sure how easy this would be for the community to do. Voice dialling, at least on S60, is basically speech recognition that handles both dialling and voice commands. It does so without prior training/recording, and it works for various languages... (a name is just a meaningless set of letters, and its pronounciation varies according to the language you speak)

I'm not aware of any free software that could perform this so easily. (If there is any - i would love to have it to voice-control my desktop :) ...)

Even if there is a solution the community could build upon, i'm not sure if it's the most efficient way of getting the task done... knowing that the Finns already have the code and the know-how etc., only trapped in a different OS-world.

It might be easier to do text2speech, like having the N900 read the name of the caller when it rings. I know this is the very first thing that'll annoy me when I receive my N900 and try to use it as a phone: That there's no way to tell if I should take it out of the pocket to accept the call without getting it out of the pocket to look at who's calling.

Re: Voice dialling
 

Granted, as you say they already have it in a different OS. So how do we get Nokia to make this happen? Do they listen? Send e-mails? A large thread here?

Re: Voice dialling
 

Nokia has repeatedly pointed out that what happens in this community, while interesting, will not replace usual ways of market research. We can do whatever we want... If Nokia has data telling them that only 0,74% of the target group would want voice dialling, they'll probably not implement it.
If their data indicate that voice dialling is an important feature, they may already be working on it.

Re: Voice dialling
 

FWIW, I would like to see voice dialing implemented as I have used it in the past, but the voice dialing for my N95 is 100% useless. It has a near 0% recognition rate so I have not used voice dialing since my last phone.

So, if Nokia is listening then yes its a feature people (at least I) will want but only if it is implemented correctly.

Re: Voice dialling
 

Seriously.. Who uses that option?

Re: Voice dialling
 

If they have data indicating that the intarnets will be as hung up on the N900's lack of voice dialling as they were on MMS on the Iphone? I do believe whatever the first/biggest bloggers/testers will put a focus on, can be a marketing issue.

I do not believe that there will be any much focus on voice dialling though. It's too easy to make revenge jokes about MMS.

Re: Voice dialling
 

I certainly do, daily. When using any form of handsfree (whether that's walking down the street with a headset or driving in a car with a carkit) it is by far the easiest, and in a car the only legal, way of dialing.

Re: Voice dialling
 

It's much faster than scrolling through contacts. Speed-dial for a few preferred contacts that I call very often, for everything else I use voice dial - except I'm in public, I hate doing this in puclic. It just looks too stupid. ;)

Re: Voice dialling
 

Any drivers in the UK

Re: Voice dialling
 

it's not just voice calling, have you seen the voice navigation? Voice activation for the media player "play track <song>"? If im not mistaken it already exists in android.
Voice dialing is just the tip of the iceberg.

Re: Voice dialling
 

definitely need voice dialling and speed dial. What i would also love to see is voice number recognition where I can speak numbers and the N900 would dial. Comes in handy when you have to take down a number while driving or when hands are busy. That's on my wishlist, but we definitely need voice dialing on a 'smartphone.'

Re: Voice dialling
 

It is quite extraordinary that Nokia permits the release of a flagship 'phone without voice activated dialling. In fact voice activated commands (such as for media selection) and voice commands for the Navigation are all essential if this device is to be of any use in a vehicle.

Re: Voice dialling
 

Just today I've thought it would be so great to have voice dialling...maybe someone will develop it.

Re: Voice dialling
 

There are some projects on this in the linux world. I do not know how vivid they are but they do exist.

It would be cool but not necessary for me. I would prefer if it come from the community.. cause if it came from Nokia it would probably be a closed source blobb..

Re: Voice dialling
 

Is anyone still thinking of developing a voice dialler as this would be very nice to have on the N900. Scrolling through contacts whilst it is in car holder is tricky and also illegal here in UK!

Re: Voice dialling
 

I recently started researching the possibility to implement voice dialing.

What i (think) to know so far and whats my ideas / possible hickups are:

- Real speech recognition is hard to implement
- Assigning a wav file to a contact and then comparing that recording to the new recording should be easier to implement so thats the direction i used in my research.

I found a library and sample for fingerprinting a wave file to use for comparsion. (post the url and name later don't remember the name), but had not the time to test it if i create, lets say 5 wave recordings of me saying the same name and then fingerprinting the wav files and test if i get the same fingerprint.

So i thing first part of creating a working voice dialing application for maemo/meego should create or find a way to get some kind of speech recognition or speech comparing/fingerprinting.

After that my idea was to use n900 communication api to use. like adding a new communication service (like jabber, skype...) and then add a new field to each contact to assign a wave for the "voice dial" service account..

After the dialing itself i had two ideas.
First one is quite easy, you press the mic button, i catch the press and then play a short beep and then record from the mic the next 5 to 10 seconds and compare the recording / fingerprint with all stored contacts wav files, only drawbacks i guess is if you use some other apps which listens to the dbus event of pressing the mic button.

Other idea is to assign a "master word" wave recording to the communication service itself like "dial" and then if you say "dial" it recognize that you want to start the voice dialing and do the same as if you pressed the mic button in the first example.
The problems i see is that we always must record stuff and if its in a specific volume process it to detect we recorded the "master word". also a problem could be where we think the word began or ended. this also will reduce the battery life.

Thats only my ideas i had so far.
So my ideas in short and my preferred order and solutions:

1. Find or create a working wave fingerprinting/comparison algorithm
2. Implement an easy assign a wave to a contact method, either via a communication service plugin or a separate app.
3. Write an dbus listener which listens to to mic button press and then starts recording, comparing and if a match found play the match (for comparsion that you are sure you dial the right one) and then start dialing.

edit:
the software i found is called: libfooid and i use it from here:
http://blog.asymptotic.co.uk/softwar...ing-mp3-files/

currenlty doing some tests with it :)

Re: Voice dialling
 

A nice project that could be ported to Maemo to accomplish this task is Simon Listens for KDE.

I have also seen that Sphinx is now in the repos with a lot of libraries, so someone is maybe working on this.