Has anybody tried or researched he idea of using a voice recognition software to pilot Dorico’s keyboard shortcuts
This would be the ideal way to enter music without moving our hands back and forth from the keyboard to the computer.
ex: enter the notes with the keyboard and change the rhythm values, by voice.
this is perhaps a naive idea but who knows…
Wow! Posted in 2016 and no responses! I’d like to revive this idea! The dorico team have awesomely implemented midi commands to perform functions and access menu items. This bypasses the need for third party software to convert midi to key presses. Could the team also implement voice recognition? Imagine that. At the moment, when inputting, I’m thinking in my head (ok quarter note, now rest, change to 8th note, etc etc). Imagine saying this out loud and it all gets entered! Could that be a game changer? I recently saw an interview with steve duda (absolute champion). He says that’s where music software is heading. Removing the keyboard and mouse, getting away from that. Big stuff going on behind the scenes. Gesture and AI driven stuff. I’m surprised this has not been brought up again in almost 3 years to the day since this post. What do we think?
We have no plans for this at the moment. I wouldn’t rule it out for the future, but it’s certainly not likely to be something we approach any time soon.
If you want to try it, just do it. WIndows 10 and OSX both have voice recognition built in.
But don’t expect it to be as quick and error-free as old technology like keyboards and mice. The main accuracy problem is that voice recognition is good at recognizing whole sentences (and figuring out from the context whether a particular word is “here” or “hear”, etc) but not so good at recognizing single characters. The “ee letters” in English (B C D E G P T V and Z in American English) tend to be a worst case scenario (typical error rates around 1 in 12 characters) which might not be good news for entering musical notes, for example.
I did experiment with Dorico 1 in connection with Nuance’s Dragon recognition software. I found it very encouraging overall, although designing a useful command set takes a good deal of time (and preferably some additional scripting); and after that, this approach needs also some effort for maintenance, as a command set may evolve for a while.
I don’t do that anymore, since I do so little basic note input, and a voice recognition workflow is not efficient if you don’t keep at it. But for users that do a lot of note input daily, it certainly is worth a try. It comes with a lot of tinkering in the beginning, though; also, I really recommend a professional recognition software. I tried other ones as well (including the Windows on-board package, which is actually a scaled-down Nuance software, if I remember correctly), and they are impressive, but there is a clearly noticeable gap between them and Dragon Professional, for example.
One last thing: a voice recognition workflow can indeed bring some very unique advantages, but the one thing that struck me by surprise was how much it can actually strain your voice after a while.