simon says: Hello Planet KDE!

This is the first blog post that is going to be aggregated to the planet and as such I feel that a short introduction is in order.

My name is Peter Grasch and for the past couple of years I have been working on an open source speech recognition software called simon.

With simon you can control your computer with voice commands.

simon uses the KDE 4 libraries, Julius and the HTK and is developed under the GPL license. You can find more information on our sourceforge page and in an interview on the dot.

Together with Franz Stieger, Mathias Stieger and Alexander Breznik I am also chairing the non profit research organization called "Simon Listens" which uses the simon software and other open source projects to research speech recognition and its applications through multiple research projects funded by the Austrian Benefit project and the European Union.

Through one of this projects I have also been lucky enough to be able to attend this years Akademy where I gave a talk and held a workshop about simon.

In Tampere I got the opportunity to, among many other interesting people, meet some of the KDE accessibility guys: Jeremy Whiting and Gunnar Schmidt. We discussed the current state of accessibility in KDE SC, the most pressing problems and how they could be tackled.

There is definitely a lot of work laying ahead of us but there are also some highly motivated people (yes Jeremy, I am looking at you :) working on this.

So lets join forces, buckle down and try to make KDE SC accessible to everybody!