callbacks for beginning and end of voice activity detection

[timo]

for example to display an indicator on screen while talon is recognizing something as speech; it could be useful for noticing when talon is recognizing speech while you're not speaking, or for noticing when talon isn't recognizing speech when you are in fact speaking

[gimpf]

in the same vain, callbacks/state updates for start/end of executing actions etc. would be helpful, so a full notification cycle like this could be done:

• detecting speech -> decoding -> running commands
• detecting speech [-> decoding] -> rejected (could not understand words, no command for words, etc.)

this would also help for developing talon modules, as sometimes it's not the speech that's the issue, but a bad configuration

[jgarvin]

Figured I'd repeat here what I wrote on slack so that people have an example use case.

In my old system I have the emacs cursor color be yellow if listening is off, blue if dragon is thinking, green if last utterance was recognized and red if it was not. This gives me visual feedback about what the speech engine is doing near where my eyes already happen to be looking, and also helps me distinguish whether the speech engine is being laggy or if emacs is.

Also sometimes nothing happens, and you can't tell if it was because the utterance got recognized as something that happens to be a no-op (e.g. got interpreted as delete line on a line that's already blank) vs not recognized

I'm using "command history" right now but I have to keep looking to the upper left so it doesn't work quite as well

[rntz]

It would be nice if, besides being able to listen for vad events, one could also inject them, for example, to force talon to process some speech immediately by injecting an end of activity event. This would allow using an external input to signal that a voice command has been completed.