@ Akshat Jain:
Sure, and winter. It’s also today, tomorrow and yesterday (somewhere in the world) ^^.

@ air king:
Sorry, I’ve never heard about that series. Google tells me something about some code which can be scanned using a camera, is that what you’re talking about?

@ KaKaRoTo:
Heh. I haven’t tried that with the latest version, but I don’t think the algorithm would be happy about it.

Once the venue closed I went with Will and Steph to the Canonical party and eventually we arrived there.

Thanks, Will.

GUADEC rocked, keep in touch!

take care Siegfried,

— Juanjo

The first hypothesis about the UI that is supposed to be verified in GnomeShell usability tests (http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/UsabilityTesting/PhaseI) is the following:

1. A persistent window list is distracting to the user. A user will be less distracted if the window list is not always visible on the screen.

How about another hypothesis:

1a. A user would prefer to be able to switch between running applications with just one click instead of two

IMHO the taskbar is one of the best achievements for desktop UI design, I remember how much of a difference it made when moving from Windows 3.11 to 95.
The decision to get rid of the taskbar is similar only to Microsoft’s decision to get rid of the application menus and replace them with a loosely structured collection of icons (the ribbon UI)

You can see that in the example included in the “julius-voxforge” Ubuntu package. For your convenience, I’ll post a copy of the current Python code here:

#! /usr/bin/python -u
# (Note: The -u disables buffering, as else we don't get Julius's output.)
#
# Command and Control Application for Julius
#
# How to use it:
#  julius -quiet -input mic -C julian.jconf 2>/dev/null | ./command.py
#
# Copyright (C) 2008, 2009 Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals 
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see .

# Supported commands:
#
# This file is provided as an example, and should be modified to suit
# your needs. As is, it only supports a few commands and executes them on
# either Rhythmbox or Banshee.

import sys
import os

class Rhythmbox:

	name = "Rhythmbox"

	commands = {
			'play': 'play',
			'pause': 'pause',
			'next': 'next',
			'prev': 'previous',
			'show': 'notify',
			'pause': 'pause',
			'silence': 'pause',
	}

	def parse(self, word):
		if word in self.commands:
			return 'rhythmbox-client --%s' % self.commands[word]

class Banshee:

	name = "Banshee"

	commands = {
			'play': 'play',
			'pause': 'pause',
			'stop': 'stop',
			'next': 'next',
			'prev': 'previous',
			'pause': 'pause',
			'silence': 'pause',
	}

	def parse(self, word):
		if word in self.commands:
			return 'banshee --no-present --%s %% ' % self.commands[word]

class CommandAndControl:

	def __init__(self, file_object):

		# Determine which media player to use
		if os.system('ps xa | grep -v grep | grep banshee >/dev/null') == 0:
			self.mediaplayer = Banshee()
		elif os.system('ps xa | grep -v grep | grep rhythmbox >/dev/null') == 0:
			self.mediaplayer = Rhythmbox()
		elif os.system('which banshee >/dev/null') == 0:
			self.mediaplayer = Banshee()
			os.system('bash -c "nohup banshee >/dev/null 2>&1 < &1 & disown %%"')
		elif os.system('which rhythmbox >/dev/null') == 0:
			self.mediaplayer = Rhythmbox()
		else:
			print 'Couldn\'t find a supported media player. ' \
				'Please install Rhythmbox or Banshee.'
			sys.exit(1)
		print 'Taking control of %s media player.' % self.mediaplayer.name

		startstring = 'sentence1: <s> '
		endstring = ' </s>'

		while 1:
			line = file_object.readline()
			if not line:
				break
			if 'missing phones' in line.lower():
				print 'Error: Missing phonemes for the used grammar file.'
				sys.exit(1)
			if line.startswith(startstring) and line.strip().endswith(endstring):
				self.parse(line.strip('\n')[len(startstring):-len(endstring)])

	def parse(self, line):
		# Parse the input
		params = [param.lower() for param in line.split() if param]
		if not '-q' in sys.argv and not '--quiet' in sys.argv:
			print 'Recognized input:', ' '.join(params).capitalize()

		# Execute the command, if recognized/supported
		command = self.mediaplayer.parse(params[1])
		if command:
			os.system(command)
		elif not '-q' in sys.argv and not '--quiet' in sys.argv:
			print 'Command not supported by %s.' % self.mediaplayer.name

if __name__ == '__main__':
	try:
		CommandAndControl(sys.stdin)
	except KeyboardInterrupt:
		sys.exit(1)

You execute it like this:

julius -quiet -input mic -C julian.jconf 2>/dev/null | ./command.py

This way Julius will run and write the recognized words (together with some other useless text) to the standard output. That text will be forwarded to the Python script which can then identify the relevant words and see whether they are recognized.

As you can see, this is just a quick hack. Theoretically it should be possible to use libjulius to access Julius directly from Python, but I’m not sure what the state of said library is at the moment and I haven’t found time to look into it yet.

can give some explanation on how do you actually send the “word” that you get from Julius to the python language?

Thank you

AFAIK most of the biggest media player support MPRIS, so it would be easy to adopt your code.