From: Stéphane Doyon <s.doyon_at_videotron.ca>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 11:03:19 -0400 (EDT)

Hi,

I'd like to ask again for help from devs with some voice related
patches. I have a slew of them on the tracker, and they have generated
very little interest from devs.

I'd first like to check again for interest and try to get a better feel
for what's acceptable, what can be considered for inclusion.

-I've started with fairly simplistic patches, but perhaps they are so
unexciting that no one has bothered with them.

-OTOH, I know some developers feel the voice feature is bloat. I'm
thankful to one dev for at least telling it to me straight and discussing
it. Even for more moderate devs, I understand that keeping Rockbox's
binary size and resource utilization low is a high priority.

I have tried a bit to advocate some patches on IRC and ask for advice,
with no results so far. I've admitedly not spent a lot of time on IRC. But
I believe my timezone (-0400), and the fact that my spare time is mostly
at night, is cutting me off from a lot of the devs.

I have a lot more ideas on making Rockbox's voice interface more usable,
but at this point I'd like to see some progress on the simple patches and
get a better feel of what's acceptable.

Here are a few simple patches with no particular dependencies.

P7563 Speak dynamic equalizer setting menus
Takes care of the dynamic strings in the simple and advanced eq menus.

P6325: Add speech to the recording trigger settings screen
It's using a fancier layout than ordinary, but I don't see any reason not
to speak it.

P6171 Talking quick screen
The quickscreen is probably not very useful nowadays since the addition
of the root menu context submenus, but the issue is that since the
quickscreen is not announced, one can stumble into it by mistake, and
then find it somewhat confusing that none of the buttons seem to work
anymore.

I have a patch that's just about essential to make the keyboard usable
with voice: say so when we land on the edit line, beep when trying to
move past the left or right end of the edit line... The patch is
admitedly well hidden: it's kbd-accessible.diff inside P6324.

There's P6188, which is what iRiver users apparently call "study mode",
which I've been using for a year and find invaluable when listening to
books or podcasts, especially with a sensitive joystick button like on
the X5.

I have a more infrastructure-oriented patch which, perhaps because it's
slightly more ambitious and promises cleanups, caught nls's attention
(thank you):
P7774: Voice callback for gui_synclist
plus P7775: Use list voice callback in file browser

I've heard very positive comments from several blind users about
P6240: Improved voice feedback in bookmark selection
And I think the playlist_catalog adaptation in P6323 is simple and
useful.
These have a couple of dependencies though, and I could use some advice
on P6239 about how to manage multiple thumbnail buffers without adding
too much bloat.

I have many more ideas, but there seems little point in putting out more
patches until I know where I stand with this stuff.

I do of course understand that everybody is busy and everyone has their
own interests. I would appreciate it very much if one or two devs would
agree to spend some time on this stuff. I need to know whether some of
this can go forward, or whether I should stop, or what I need to do
differently.

Thanks

-- 
Stéphane Doyon
<s.doyon_at_videotron.ca>
http://pages.videotron.com/sdoyon/

Received on 2007-09-27