
Tired of typing in Slack? Use Webspeech recognition API to chat hands-free - crackleware
https://github.com/crackleware/slack-webspeech
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afandian
By the time I'm speaking to my computer so it can TTS into Slack so I can
converse with my colleague sitting at the next desk I might as well rotate my
head 90°...

(EDIT: I should also add that at any point in time my colleagues may be spread
over Massachusetts, New York, California, Oxfordshire, London, Britanny,
Victoria, Lower Saxony and that's when they're not travelling. But we also use
it for conversations when we're in the same office.)

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imgabe
Now they just need a voice synthesizer on the other end to convert the text
back into speech to the person doesn't have to look at it, but can just listen
to it instead. Man, that would be convenient!

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adwww
Yeah caus everyone (outside of America at least) loves speaking out loud to
inanimate objects.

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amelius
Why should this be specific to Slack? Can't this just use OS-level speech-to-
text functionality?

(Just like other input devices, e.g. keyboard and mouse)

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Rafert
Because the JS targets Slack HTML to insert the recognized text from the
webkitSpeechRecognition API.

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throwanem
Something something open plan something something noise. Neat hack, though!

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grafelic
I'm not tired of typing in Slack, I'm tired of the fact that most of my co-
workers use it, which in turn forces me to type and waste time in it.

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mrits
I don't understand the appeal of slack over IRC.

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pilif
embedded media, searchable archive, ready-made webhook integration, synced
history across machines, proper support for multiple logged-in clients (and
lately, I'm really impressed with how well the voice chat works compared to,
say, skype).

Yes. There's a solution for all of this with IRC, but some of it requires
specialised clients, servers running somewhere and some of it requires you to
write additional code.

We're in the business of writing code for our core product, not for our
internal chat server.

I'm not entirely opposed to writing code for our infrastructure that's not
completely product-related but if I can have something that works out of the
box for a reasonable amount of money, then I will go that way.

OTOH, when the problem concerns some dependency of the product in any way,
then I'm totally willing to go much greater lengths of doing the work on our
end than most of other people.

Because every single piece of the puzzle you control fully is a piece you
won't have to find a replacement for in a hurry sometime in the future.

But company-internal chat? If Slack breaks (or gets too expensive), there are
ton of alternatives all of which would be more or less equal replacements.

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xPaw
IRC clients already exist that can do most of these things, like
[https://thelounge.github.io](https://thelounge.github.io)

/Shameless plug

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pavel_lishin
It looks like I have to run and administer my own server, and I don't see any
support for uploading media or searching previous conversations.

The demo is pretty, though.

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problems
Uploading media is best done by using something like ShareX pointed at an
internal server though so that you don't send important information outside
the company.

The number of times I see people write root passwords or financial info in
Slack is scary.

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vt100
I'm also tried of reading in Slack. Please add TTS too.

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dmichulke
A product with these two features already exists under the name of skype ;)

Technically, you'd just need this STT solution to write a log somewhere
(pastebin?)

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the_af
And before Skype, actual phone calls! :)

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dsr_
I've been wondering how long it's going to be before we have enough computrons
in our phones to do real-time full text voice recognition, with the aim of
sending over a voice model to the other side (or not) and subsequently sending
only text. You get huge compression for long conversations, making phone calls
possible under stupidly bad bandwidth and packet loss constraints.

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afandian
I wonder what modern AI could do with vocoded signals. That's super low
bandwidth (and sounds it) but I'm sure some modern software could do a good
reconstruction.

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tootie
I use Slack because I'm tired of speaking.

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crackleware
I packaged it as Chrome extension:

[https://github.com/crackleware/slack-
webspeech/commit/afae06...](https://github.com/crackleware/slack-
webspeech/commit/afae0670ca1783f0c3186d65ffe82b862eb59a08)

Featuring TTS (optional).

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rgun
Nice! Better solution would be a chrome plugin

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crackleware
Definitively!

