What happened to 0.3 alpha 2?

It's been a whole month since the last release of the 0.3 series.

The reason for this is not because nothing happened since then (quite the contrary) but rather that we are waiting for the next patch level Qt release.

For 0.3 alpha 2 we finally switched from portaudio to QtMultimedia which fixed some long standing issues on Ubuntu. However, it also introduced a few new issues because Qt 4.6.2 still has some nasty bugs in this area.

Luckily, the Qt software team is incredibly responsive and the most important bugs have already been fixed in their current development version.

Because two of these bugs are blockers for simon (QtMultimedia always uses default output device on Linux, Not supporting 16 kHz recordings on Windows) we sadly have to wait for Qt 4.6.3 to be released before we can release a new test version.

simon at the Akademy 2010

The conference program for this years Akademy is online and it looks like we got a pretty sweet timeslot.

Scenarios coming to life

With simon 0.3 we introduce the scenario system: A package based recognition architecture allows users to simply choose which use cases they want the speech recognition to handle from a vast online repository.

That's the idea. The problematic part is that "vast online repository". We obviously can't anticipate all use cases of simon, nor do we have the necessary manpower to design all of those scenarios. But what we can do - and what we already did - was to make it very easy to create and share scenarios from within simon.

Now we depend on the community to pick up the concept and start creating / uploading scenarios.

This is why I was excited to see the first user contributed scenario uploaded to kde-files.org: The day before yesterday, Ken Maclean (of Voxforge fame) created and uploaded a scenario to control the music player rythmbox.

Considering a stable version of simon hasn't even been released yet I am looking forward to many more user contributed scenarios being uploaded soon!

Want to get involved? Contact us at support ate simon-listens dot org to find out more!

simon at the LinuxWochen 2010

This Saturday, the 8th of May, we will present the current prototype of simon at the biggest IT event in Austria - the "Linuxwochen" in Vienna (program).

The admission is free.

Akademy

Our talk proposal for the Akademy 2010 was accepted!

Still waiting for the "official" banner to insert at this point but:
I'm going to Akademy!