Mario Fux


Posts Tagged ‘SImon’

New maintainership for the Simon speech recognition

Saturday, October 17th, 2015

But before I tell you more about my new relationship with and to Simon I need to apologize for the delay of the promised blog series called My Wishion for KDE (and yes “wishion” is an amalgamation of “wish” and “vision”). They will start, as soon as next week. Sorry that you need to wait a little longer but I had my good reasons. Some rather bad things happened last week and they had absolute priority.

This is a very ambivalent year for me. Some great things happened: e.g. the birth of my second son Simon and the finishing of my studies. And then there are these worst case things happened to my family. Oh and for the case you sent me an email recently and I didn’t answer yet. You will get your reply eventually, just be patient.

Now let’s talk about the other Simon – the open source speech recognition program. As you might have read Peter Grasch, the former maintainer of Simon, needed to leave the project and was searching for someone that takes it over. And as I was at this point in time the only person interested in this great tool and framework… So I’m the new maintainer of Simon and would like to thank Peter a lot for his trust and for the great work he did in and with Simon over several years!

These are some pretty big shoes to fill and I (and hopefully with the help of others) will need quite some time to learn and try. I lack a lot of the knowledge Peter has but I’m eager to learn and learn even more. So I’m going to try my best to bring Simon forward and will try to be a good father to both of my Simons.

Currently I’m in the process of reading all the bug reports, get an overview of the Simon forum, add myself as default assignee for Simon bugs, add myself as CC: for the old bugs, do some other administrative stuff and take a look at the code and some patches that already arrived.

I’d like to thank Michael Abrahams for a first port (or start of it) to KDE Frameworks 5 (KF5) and Qt5 and Frederik Gladhorn to commit Michael’s patches to a branch while I was busy with the Randa Meetings 2015.

For the future I hope to make a last Qt4-based release (probably even before the end of this week). Later I’d like to work on the KF5-port and see where it makes sense to restructure some things. Oh and I of course would like to work with Peter’s last gift: Lera.

So if you’re interested in open source speech recognition and Simon in particular don’t hesitate to contact me or subscribe yourself to the kde-speech mailing list.