Inclusion of simon in kde-accessibility

[Peter Grasch]

Hello!

On Sunday 18 July 2010 22:55:54 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> If you want to move to KDE core modules you give up any kind of power on
> that kind of decision, your code will be moved were KDE decides, not where
> you decide, of course you can choose not to be on KDE core modules until
> KDE code modules are on git, that's totally your decision though a short
> sigthed one in my opinion.
I aware of that but I would rather opt for keeping the code on sourceforge 
until the move to git is complete because I use branches quite extensively and 
in my experience SVN just can't handle them efficiently.


> I am personally more concerned about the dependency it has (or had?) on non
> free software, can you comment on that?
Of course.

There has been much talk about the HTK so I'll just point you to the 
discussion on lwn following the dot article last year:
http://lwn.net/Articles/348267/

Short summary:
* simon can use the HTK but is already very functional without it (voice 
control doesn't need the HTK if you use for example the GPL voxforge model)
* simon doesn't link to the HTK in any way. It just runs them as external 
programs if the user does something that requires the HTK.
* simon is only very loosely bound to the HTK. Technically CMU SPHINX would be 
just as good and simon has been designed for that part of the system to be 
interchangable. However, the documentation of SPHINX is not as good as the one 
from the HTK and the University that helps us with the speech recognition part 
of the project has never used SPHINX before.
* There is a converter between HTK and SPHINX models so you can use SPHINX 
manually if you need to change a model and don't want to use non free 
software.

Btw, if you saw the demonstration at Akademy - none of what I showed there 
required the HTK.

Regards,
Peter
-- 
Peter Grasch
SIMON listens e.V.
http://simon-listens.org