Talon German

German Dictation Mode for the beta version subscription of Talon Voice.

This is a fork of earlier setups, adding some improvements.

Usage

Say german [mode] to switch from command mode to German dictation mode and english / ego to switch back. Use nimitz <german phrase> for single german phrases like you would use say <english phrase> (from russian "nemetz" for "german"). Check out the german.talon (and german.py) files for German commands.

Improvements:

I added various improvements for myself. Check out german.talon for more existing commands.

Text editing and navigation

A handful of additional commands that make on-the-fly edits of text much more convenient. especially:

• springe links / rechts will jump whole words in left / right direction
• lösche links / rechts will delete whole words in left / right direction
• entferne links / rechts will delete single chars in left / right direction
• großgeschrieben / mach groß helps fixing capitalization mistakes from vos You can suffix most of these with a number to repeat them, for example springe links 5.

In addition to already existing gehe rauf / runter / recht / links for single char movements.

Symbols

Some improvements regarding symbols - you can use more symbols and direct dictation now. Also added more symbols I frequently used, for example in Klammern ( ()), Spiegelstrich (-), Ellipse (...), Schrägstrich oder (/), Zeilenumbruch, Leerzeichen ...

Improved robustness of commands with VOSK

Since registered commands have no influence on what VOSK detects (talon only gets the result after speech recognition), misdetections for commands can be a lot more common than with conformer. I improved robustness of many of the commands by adding many of the common misrecognitions as possible alternatives. Unfortunately, this makes my talon file a bit uglier to read, since something like "springe rechts" now turns into "(springe | sprenge | spring | sprang | ... ) rechts"

German mode / quick german phrases

The original setup introduced a way to dictate a quick german phrase while in english mode without having to switch to german mode and back (like a german say command). This was originally just an improved version of the german [mode] command used to change modes (for example german Hallo Welt instead of german <pause> Hallo Welt english <pause>). Note that the implementation for this is somewhat of hack and behavior might change with updates in talon or the english speech model.

Since I would sometimes switch into german mode when I did not want to or fail to remain in german mode (resulting in my german text getting interpreted as a bunch of english commands), I set up the quick german phrase and the german mode change to use separate commands (there is also the fact that my german accent made the 'r' in 'german' a bit harder to recognize when quickly chaining):

• german switches to german mode and stays there.
• nimitz (from russian "nemetz" for german) will interpret the following phrase as german and allow you to continue in english as before. This is the german equivalent of say <english phrase>.

Use english, or short ego (japanese "eigo" for english) to switch back.

Quick access to configuration

Similar to customize ... in the community command set, following commands allow quick access to important configuration files:

• [modifiziere | bearbeite] deutsche Wörter opens a additional_words_de.csv file placed next to community additional_words.csv. Use this to add new words or fix misrecognitions as well as capitalisation mistakes coming from vosk. Note: actually, it works more like words_to_replace.csv, since it only replaces things that vosk recognized but cannot get it to recognize new stuff - I should rename that.
• [modifiziere | bearbeite] deutsche Befehle opens german.talon The commands open a gvim instance. Currently, the commands use a simple hard-coded path, so you will have to change that.

Context sensitive dictation

Can be activated for german dictation with the setting user.context_sensitive_dictation_german (this is separate from the english setting). Uses the community peek function, this keeps the behavior consistent and allows to make use of overloaded definitions for applications with special behavior.

Context sensitive dictation also applies to nimitz <phrase>, which means it is not necessary to add or remove spaces before inserting a german phrase (I find this to be very convenient).

Eye tracker control

You can control your eye tracker with the commands Tracking (an | aus | Augen | Kopf | kalibrieren).

Caveats:

• Only primitive capitalization
• Punctuation is less smart than in community as well, especially if you do not use context sensitive dictation
• The usage of vosk limits you to what vosk recognizes - adding words or commands in your talon configuration will not influence vosk itself in any way, so you must match all phrases that vosk might hear (so while you might have to command "springe", Vosk might just as well recognize "spring" or "sprenge" instead).
• Trying to do go to sleep / talon sleep while in german mode will have no effect currently. You will have to cycle through sleep / wake however when switching back to english afterwards. Therefore, for sleep you have to switch back to an english mode beforehand, or mute the microphone.

Todo:

• Rename additional_words_de.csv to words_to_replace_de.csv since that is what the file actually does
• Currently uses absolute paths for csvs, use relative paths (perhaps switch to .talon-list)
• Extract commonly used command prefixes like springe, bearbeite deutsche, lösche, entferne into something like a variable to make addition of alternate variations simpler and improve readability
• Better structure of commands, split into seperate files
• Add version of the großgeschrieben command that will permanently add the capitalized word to the csv
• Support for sleeping / waking while in german mode
• Remove custom Clipscanner clipboard implementation in favor of talon / community clipboard API

Dependencies

This is a plug-in for Talon Voice (https://talonvoice.com/). Requires the talon beta subscription for its support of additional speech engines. Assumes the community command set to be present in the talon user directory (for providing the peek function for context sensitive dictation and as shared location for the words_to_replace_de csv).

Setup

• download the newest German language model from alphacephei into ~/.talon/vosk/ or your preferred location:

  mkdir -p ~/.talon/vosk
  cd ~/.talon/vosk
  curl -LfSo vosk-model-de.zip https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models/vosk-model-de-0.21.zip
  unzip vosk-model-de.zip
  mv vosk-model-de-* vosk-model-de
  

  Note that there are models in different sizes, you can experiment with that.
• install vosk into the talon runtime by running ~/.talon/bin/pip install vosk (on windows scripts\pip install vosk)
• clone this repository into your talon user folder (~/.talon/user)

It won't work on mac unless you sign the pip installed library file yourself, or unless aegis ships the vosk kaldi library with talon pre-signed.

Related

Other related projects and repositories:

• hanueles german port of knausj (the community command set) aims to offer a complete set of german commands mirroring knausj (not only limited to a dictation mode). Like this repo, requires knausj (community) being present in the talon user directory. Seems to be less maintained though at the moment.

Also visit the #language-deutsch channel in the talon slack in case you have any questions or problems.