What FOSS Android speech recognition app do you recommend?
What FOSS Android speech recognition app do you recommend?
I'm using espeak (from F-Droid) for text to speech, and it's working great. I'd like an app that does speech to text though, ideally supporting Swedish as well as English for Duolingo purposes, but even just English would be more than I have now.
What are the details of the futo repo so I can install it with Droidify?
Thanks, I tried it out just now, and it's pretty good. Although, unless you set the language manually, it seems to take a while to detect the language. Maybe my phone is just too old.
Sayboard?
I think that's it. The two mentioned things in the previous comments are also what I've seen floating around. Sayboard and FUTO's voiceinput. The former is free software and FUTO releases under a source-available license. Additionally you can use something like Kõnele (available in F-Droid) to connect to cloud-based services. Disregarding free software, there are probably a few others with a proprietary license. For example Google's STT that is baked into their Android versions.
Googles "speech services" works on GrapheneOS using sandboxed play services.
Until they have added a Permission to restrict InterProcessCommunication (IPC) (Like possible on Linux with Flatpak) this might be too big of a privacy problem though.
Also a lot of Google stuff is basically a proprietary cloud adapter.
Yeah, I don't know if OP was looking for that. They specified 'FOSS' in the title. But I think Google can also do local STT nowadays, I haven't tried it for quite a while. Sayboard and FUTO work remarkably well. I personally am struggling a bit more with the reverse part: TTS. There isn't much except for espeak if you want other languages than English (and maybe Russian since there is another project that does a few other languages.) But I skipped on the Google services on my phone.
https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.olga_yakovleva.rhvoice.android/ I use it for organic maps in the car which is fine. not sure how it does otherwise. No Swedish yet at least
RHvoice is text-to-speech (TTS), what OP is asking for is the opposite: speech-to-text (aka voice recognition).
FUTO Voice Input. Hands down:
- It works fantastically well
- It works offline - in other words, Google doesn't get to spy on what you say
- It supports Swedish
FUTO asks you to pay for the app but doesn't force you to. You get the whole application regardless. Just for not treating users like crap and for releasing such nice apps, you really should pay them.
If you do, make sure you download the APK from F-Droid or directly from them, so Google doesn't get any of your money: the APK served by the Google Play Store uses the Play Store to collect payment, whereas the APK served by F-Droid and the direct download APK allows you to send FUTO money directly with Stripe (credit card).
Unfortunately FUTO apps like this and Greyjay are not truly free software, they are source available with a proprietary EULA.
https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/10/18/grayjay-is-not-open-source/
Interesting! Thank you for the link.
To be honest, I am not a lawyer so those issues didn't jump at me when I quickly read through the - very terse - license.
Also, FUTO seems like decent people, and trustworthy off-line voice input software that users escape the Google surveillance is hard to come by. FUTO Voice Input is pretty much the only game in town, and the fact that it comes with source code is amazing to me. So I kind of overlooked the finer points to be honest, because it surprisingly ticks all the other boxes that matter to me.
Thanks!