add voice support

[yaotly]

I would like to see voice support for voice recognition.
Thank you very much.
Nexus one

[cyril]

Hi
this is the hot topic Of course I know it's requested by a lot of people, but currently I have no access to a phone with voice input support, and I'm not sure it can work in the emulator. It's very difficult (read - nearly impossible) to develop this without being able to test, so at the moment it's not planned.
But maybe in the future !

[jetrost]

As far as the issue of voice support goes, I have it working great on my phone. I believe it is not an issue the Smart Keyboard app needs to address, however.

From what I understand, Android version 2.1 has the voice support for the keyboard built in automatically. For me, if I press the Menu button while the softkeyboard is on-screen, one of the options that appears is "Speak". Pressing this brings up the microphone on screen and converts anything I speak into text.

Edit: I just realized that this only works as I described above in the Handcent SMS app.

[cyril]

The problem is that the phone needs speech recognition support to have this working. I will need to figure out how to install it..

[mazz0310]

As far as the issue of voice support goes, I have it working great on my phone. I believe it is not an issue the Smart Keyboard app needs to address, however.

From what I understand, Android version 2.1 has the voice support for the keyboard built in automatically. For me, if I press the Menu button while the softkeyboard is on-screen, one of the options that appears is "Speak". Pressing this brings up the microphone on screen and converts anything I speak into text.

Edit: I just realized that this only works as I described above in the Handcent SMS app.

Handcent has their own voice support built into the program.

[cyril]

Handcent has their own voice support built into the program.

No, I have handcent too and the voice input doesn't work. Voice input needs a closed-source package provided by Google, to transmit the voice to their voice recognition server (it's not done on the phone itself). This package is only distributed in US phones so I don't have it, but I will try to get it in some custom ROM.

[HippoMan]

I realize and understand the difficulties that you have in getting voice support on a phone so you can then add speech-to-text capabilities to Smart Keyboard.

I just want to add my vote for this feature, whenever you might be able to implement it.

When you can do this, my preference is not to have speech-to-text be invoked via a microphone button (because on other keyboards, that button gets in the way during normal typing), but rather, that it be added to the list of swipe-invocable commands.

I'm patient, and I'm not complaining. I'm very happy with Smart Keyboard, and I have already purchased the Pro version. I commend you on your excellent work!

[HippoMan]

Handcent has their own voice support built into the program.

For the minority of people who use a keyboard solely for SMS via their phone provider and absolutely nothing else, Handcent's voice support will be sufficient.

But for the rest of us who also use the keyboard for web page input, emails, sending SMS's via Google Voice, and other similar purposes, it would be very nice to be able to use voice input with Smart Keyboard in these cases, as well.

For example, I'm using Smart Keyboard Pro right now to enter this message. It would be nice to be able to use voice input now.

Is anyone in favor of taking up a collection to help Cyril to afford a voice-capable Android device, so he can work on integrating voice with this excellent piece of software?

PS: One of Smart Keyboard's competitors, Better Keyboard, integrates with the handheld's voice capabilities, if they exist. People can choose to use voice with that product or to disable it via Settings, if they don't want it. Just because some people don't see the need for voice input doesn't mean that the rest of us shouldn't use it. I know I can always use Better Keyboard, but Smart Keyboard is better. This is why I'm in favor of our making contributions to Cyril in order to help him to get a voice-enabled device.

[cyril]

Thanks for the proposal but that won't be a problem any more as you saw in the other post

To be honest I don't find this feature that useful, probably because it only works for english :p Anyway I found a way to test it, so I'll work on it with high priority