vim-speech

This project is an attempt at getting some basic speech to text processing working in Vim using Google's cloud services.

NOTE: This project is a proof of concept.

NOTE: To use this plugin, you will probably need to pay Google money, at least eventually.

This project uses an MIT licence to allow you to basically do what you want.

Click the image below to watch a video demonstration.

Installation

Add the directory for this git project to runtimepath for Vim somehow. You can load the plugin in Vim 8 easily with the built-in plugin mechanism by storing in in a path like the following:

~/.vim/pack/git-plugins/start/vim-speech

You will also need to install ALE, as this plugin currently uses functions from ALE, purely so the plugin could be written more quickly. Follow the instructions for installing ALE.

After the plugin has been installed, you'll need to install all of the requirements for your system and build the virtualenv that the project uses for the Python text to speech client. You will need...

1. Python 2.7 with virtualenv installed.
2. Google's google-cloud-sdk tools.
3. libportaudio2 and portaudio19-dev for audio recording.

You can run the following to set up everything, including installing packages on Ubuntu:

cd ~/.vim/pack/git-plugins/start/vim-speech
./install.sh

If you don't like running scripts from the Internet, as you shouldn't, go read install.sh, look at what it does, and figure it out.

After the Python script has been set up, you will need to tell Vim and the script where your Google application credentials are by setting an environment variable. The easiest way to do this is to add a line to your vimrc file.

" This is how I specify the path to the JSON credentials file.
let $GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS = $HOME
\   . '/content/application/speech-to-text-key.json'

You have to register a Google cloud service at https://cloud.google.com/ for any of this to work. You will be given such a JSON credentials file after you register a project with access to the "Cloud Speech API." See Google's speech-to-text demo site for more information: https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/

Usage

Once you have figured out how to get everything installed, you can use the following commands in Vim for recording speech.

Command	Description
:SpeechRecord	Start recording, and start the job if needed.
:SpeechStop	Stop recording, and print the output to your buffer.
:SpeechQuit	Stop the background job and free some memory.

If you don't see any text being outputted into your buffer, you're probably just recording from the wrong device on your machine. Mess around in pavucontrol or whatever device selection application you have until it works.

Running the speech to text client outside of Vim

Run the script from a terminal where your GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable is set. For example:

# ~/whatever.json won't work, so use $HOME/whatever.json.
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="$HOME/whatever.json"

Run plugin/speech_to_text_client.py To start the speech-to-text client recording audio. It uses a simple text protocol which accepts the following commands as lines of input, in a case-insensitive manner.

Command	Description
record	Start recording audio.
stop	Stop recording audio, and get the text from Google.

The protocol will respond with the following lines.

Response	Description
record start	Signals when recording stops.
record stop	Signals when recording ends.
speech ...	Text data returned from Google.

The client will catch SIGINT and stop the client as soon as possible, in a safe manner. Debug information may be written to stderr. The client won't work at all on operating systems that aren't Unix-like.

Nothing might be coming out from the voice samples when you try to record speech. If this happens, mess around with pavucontrol and select different audio devices while recording is live. You're probably using the wrong audio device.