Feature Request (no expectations here): Voice Typing

[formicsapien]

First, this is frickin' awesome!!! Thank you for making this real!

I have no expectations, and no not judgments if you're not interested in this. I understand it also may not be very easy to implement. So my suggestion is implementing a way to do voice typing. On the Windows Touch Keyboard there's a way to enable voice typing, and I normally use that when I'm in VR (it works well enough as voice typing goes). Right now I can still use it by opening the touch keyboard (which also has the ability to show buttons steamvr keyboard does not much like you've implemented) and hitting the microphone button.

[elvissteinjr]

I've taken a quick look into the available APIs and it seems that it would at least be possible to use Window 10's speech recognition UWP APIs for this in theory. I haven't taken a deep dive into it yet, but proper handling of this functionality would be somewhat involved it appears and I'm not sure if this is functionality that would really need to integrated in Desktop+ to work well (as in, any other speech recognition software could type for you just as well). I hate saying no, but that would definitely nothing I'd tackle in the near future.

During the short research run I did come across the Win+H shortcut however. This brings up the dictation bar which is like the touch keyboard, but only for the speech recognition part. As of right now, you could set up an action with that shortcut and put the button on the UI at least. But if it's satisfactory like that, I could also imagine putting a button for that on the extended keyboard, perhaps with little bit more integration as to checking if it's already up and such (if possible. It's not a normal top-level window and I haven't checked yet if the UWP API for touch keyboard visibility applies to the dictation bar).

Hope this helps in some way at least.

[formicsapien]

No no! I only recommended the windows speech recognition because that's all I knew about. I would only argue that the windows one may be better because people can voice train it, though I'm not entirely sure the voice recognition training in windows actually affects the voice typing. I suppose the most important thing IMHO would be language support.

Again, I have no judgements nor expectations. I just wanted to voice I think a lot of people would find it useful. I'll continue to be very happy with your work even if you don't give voice typing a second thought!

[jbienz]

Creating a custom action that executes the keyboard combination Windows Key + H will start voice typing in whatever window currently has focus. Pressing Windows Key + H again or Esc stops voice typing.