faq.md

FAQ

What is Talon?

Voice recognition and eye tracking software written by @lunixbochs that runs cross platform (in beta) and is easily configurable

What hardware should I have?

Microphone

Speech recognition works better the better the microphone you have. Some recommendations are:

• Blue Yeti Nano (USB 3) - desktop, affordable and pretty good recognition. Can be attached to an arm for increased recognition. Useful if you're trying out speech recognition for the first time and don't want to spend a lot
• DPA d:fine 4188 or 4288 (nearly equivalent) with a DPA d:vice interface - expensive but highly recommend for full time use
• Stenomask - useful for open plan offices as it covers your mouth

Eye Tracking

Tobii 4C is required. Nothing else will work

I have X accent, will it work for me?

Probably! Only one way to know, the dataset is trained mostly on American accents but others work.

Are languages other than English supported?

They're being worked on, join talonvoice.slack.com and find a channel for your language to see how it's going.

How can I make talon recognise me better?

https://speech.talonvoice.com/ will help train the data set

Use USB3 if you have a USB mic.

How can I contribute?

While Talon is closed source, there's plenty you can do to help:

• https://speech.talonvoice.com/ Train the data set
• Publish your talon commands on Github for others to use like https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon or https://github.com/lunixbochs/talon_starter_pack
• Report issues in the beta https://github.com/talonvoice/beta
• Add more to these docs :)

Talon is slow, why?

If you get slow recognition times and lots of pipes in your output try lowering your input level on your mic, any small background noise will make Talon wait before it starts processing

Talon does nothing when I speak

Check the microphone Talon selected, it's at the start of the log e.g. 2020-03-04 15:27:53 INFO Activating Microphone: "Yeti Nano Analogue Stereo"

If it's the wrong one, use the menu in the app tray to change it.

Check your speech engine has initialised by looking at the log e.g. 2020-03-04 15:28:05 INFO (SpeechSystem) Activating speech engine: W2lEngine(en_US)

If your on Linux or Mac (without dragon), you'll need w2l setup.

Check you have some valid commands in ~/.talon/user. If it's empty clone https://github.com/lunixbochs/talon_starter_pack and try saying the alphabet "air bat cap drum".

Talon crashes a lot

Report it! Talon should recover from most errors itself but if it crashes report it in Slack with the output log.