By routing the output of a Windows-only speech recognition engine to a virtual machine running arch Linux and Patchbay, I can now literally say:

Hello again, world.

👋 Welcome back, you have been missed 😺

@Aljoscha which speech recognition engine is this? Dragon NaturallySpeaking? I've been looking for a good dictation software. Been trying a Linux one, getting a bit frustrated with its inaccuracies...

@André Yes, I'm using Dragon, together with the Caster framework. I haven't extensively customized it, but I am quite happy with the quality of Dragon's output. I'm certainly less productive than before, but it beats constant wrist pain, to the degree that I am even accepting working on a Windows machine.

@Mix Android I didn't, I resorted to a virtual machine running arch and then the patchbay AppImage.

Nice! I hadn't heard of Caster before, I'll consider it. I have a Windows machine gathering dust (literally), and I'm thinking I could try running it only for Dragon, and somehow piping that to my Linux laptop through my local network. I also have wrist pain sometimes, what has helped in the past (considerably) was changing from QWERTY to Colemak keyboard layout, and recently, a vertical mouse. But I hope to replace all of emails, messages, and other simple text with dictation software.

@andrestaltz It turns out that more structured plaintext formats like code are a lot more amendable to speech recognition than free-form text, especially if you use some sort of macros or snippets. Only navigating a code base can be fairly annoying, depending on how much you want to also reduce your mouse usage.