Last weekend I received the first patch for pVoice from Mattia Barbon. Finally someone else than just me is actually doing something with the code. It's just a minor patch, but it's a start which makes me very happy.
Work and personal issues have been keeping me from working on pVoice in the past months. I hardly did anything, so I decided I had to make some changes in the plans for the 2.2 release. It's been over a year (even more than 1.5 years) since 2.1 was released, and until I finish 2.2 I can't really release any plugins. I have so many ideas and so many unfinished pieces of code on my harddrive that should really become plugins for pVoice, but until I manage to release 2.2 it's all pretty much worthless vapourware.
Next month I will be speaking about pVoice and other Open Source Assistive Technology at Euro OSCON, and I feel that I can't really show up there without at least a newer release of pVoice than what I presented at OSCON last year. The way it looks now, I have a whole weekend (woohoo) to work on pVoice related stuff, and my goal is to have a complete working 2.2 version of pVoice for windows by Sunday night (really, there's not that much to do anymore, I just need to have a quiet place and time to work on it)
After that, I can finally work on the plugin for homecontrol, and other plugins like pStory (formerly a seperate application to listen to books) and pMusic (a mediaplayer). I'm also thinking about ways to use Skype from pVoice, but the useability aspect may be a reason not to start working on it. After all, does the person on the other side of the connection really want to wait minutes until the pVoice user has built a sentence to reply to what he just said? I think not. On the other hand, does someone with a disability really want to be limited to email or instant messaging? We all would want to communicate by speech every now and then (even geeks like us).
If you have any ideas on how to implement some kind of telephony application for typical pVoice users, you're more than welcome to comment on this....
