SpeakTools.com

I don't really know what I want to say here. I always wanted to make a web page, but never figured out what I like to put on it. So don't expect any organized or well thought content here.

In my spare time I'm trying to put up new web site. Few days ago I needed a tool that can read text off the screen. I tried looking around and I couldn't find anything that works the way I wanted it, so I decided to go ahead and put some simple tool together. It took me 20 minutes to get something working based on speech to text API. Initially there was no UI at all. When you run the tool it will just read the content off the clipboard. This was working okay with the only problem that there was no way to stop this thing from reading. If you are misfortunate to run it when your clipboard is full of source code, it will read until you drop or find a way to terminate the process. BTW this lines are getting way longer, but I'm not going to do any formatting.

A couple days later my lovely wife noticed I'm playing with the tool and asked me to show it to her. She happened to have huge stata program in the clipboard when she ran the tools. I guess this was annoying for her roommate as the "thing" kept reading for long time.

This was the breaking point and I decided that minimalist approach to this is probably not the best idea. I designed primitive UI that will show up while reading so you can stop it. It seems this works good. I needed to fix a few bugs. I also added some really cool features. It will for example show you the text it's reading at the moment and will highlight current word. You can pause the reading and resume it later. Magically you can even stop the application and this terminates the reading.

Now the problem was how you install this software. I added setup project to the solution (I'm using Visual Studio) for another 10 minutes. I faced the challenge to select a name for the tool at this point as I needed to setup caption. I decided to go with first set of keyword I searched the web, when I was initially looking for something similar - speak clipboard. After all once I went thru the hassle to build the tools I rather give it away to anybody who would need it. I cannot guarantee it's going to work fine, but I'm working on it.

I felt I'd better share the source code. I tried creating workspace on gotdotnet, but this system is so incredibly slow... I don't know how projects got approved or by whom, but I couldn't help myself find the project from the search, unless I loggged in.

I shared my experience with close friend of mine, Ivan and he said - why don't you move the project to some better home like sourceforge.com or some other open source share site. You will also need a tool website. So the same evening I called a friend and he had a hosting account that he offered to share with me. Ivan booked www.speaktools.com for the purpose and we set to build the site. It's not up yet.

And it's not up, because few weeks back I started another simple project to create web-site out of xml files. This project started as I needed to build static web site for my wife research work and resume. Anyway these tools are progressing somehow now. It's about ready and we will soon have the web site up and running. I'll write another note about the tool I used to build the site. I might even build web site and submit the tool to open source repository as well. What licensing should I use for these two tools?

Anyway, I'll keep you (or whoever is reading this) posted. If you feel some urge to send me an e-mail do so by writing to george dot djabarov at speaktools.com.

btw: I have not read this document. I didn't even run it thru speller, so please tolerate the typos and all the confusing content.

cheers, george