Just wondering if there is any chance of Dorico pursuing a speech control/recognition feature in the future. I think it would be really cool and streamline my composing process to be able to input notes by speech dictation. For example, here is a clip of Mozart dictating his Requiem to Salieri in “Amadeus” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ0AkP_BFhs. Imagine if you could do this straight into Dorico!
I guess if you were a clever boffin developer you could program the Google speech API’s to link to Dorico - you could have a whole suite of commands. eg “Switch to Write mode” , “Top stave. 3rd measure, add A flat” etc “Switch to Play Mode”, “Open CC11 lane”
The sort of thing a budding student in computer science/music could start as a PhD thesis. Maybe one day…
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The Voice controls built-in to macOS are pretty sophisticated.
I don’t know whether they will work in Dorico, because it relies on the Qt framework, an intermediary layer between the code and the OS. It would be worth investigating.
This is something that should be done at the OS level, or by a third-party app, rather than something that Dorico should provide.
But Siri is obstinately awkward - driving up north the other day I asked it to play BBC Radio 2 - no matter what I tried it kept coming up with BBC Radio Stoke! No offence to Stoke of course, so shock horror I had to select it manually! If Siri has anything to do with voice input I imagine some strange scores being produced!
PS I asked other people (SATB) to try it too, same result.
I experimented with this for Note Input (particularly for setting note durations) using Speech Recognition in Windows. It worked but not well, and was pitifully slow. I also found that speaking interrupted the flow of musical thought.
In my opinion the only reason to even consider this is if you need to be able to keep both hands on a MIDI keyboard. If you do, using a MIDI footswitch might be an alternative to reaching for the computer keyboard.
If you wanted to input notes by singing then pitch to MIDI conversion is an option but using a MIDI keyboard (or other instrument) is always going to be more reliable and quicker.
It doesn’t look much fun.
