Michael Overall DPS909

My view of what virtual machines could be was a bit outdated... Perhaps....? The experience of getting one of the previous pull requests in the Code Talker repo running on my machine got me thinking about ways to try to make it easier for people to use code that needed to pull in a variety of dependencies (from packages to full on programs), and have them work on their machine without a ton of mucking about installing things manually. So far, the logistics of getting a speech-to-text extension for VS Code to work across multiple platforms (since VS Code works across multiple platforms), was proving a logistical challenge. There were unique dependencies that needed to be installed on different platforms to be able to pull audio from a machine's microphone, and on top of simple NodeJS packages that could be pulled in with "npm install", there were some Python dependencies that were needed too. Musings on cross-platform compatibility started originally when I was ...

I needed to continue to do some research on how to try to get speech-to-text functionality working in Visual Studio Code. I did some research that can be found in this pull request .  One of the issues with trying to grab microphone input and send it to an application that works across a variety of platforms is that it will not necessarily be straightforward to grab the microphone audio from various computers' hardware, and to then use a program that works across multiple platforms to parse the audio. Web apps have generally tended to be associated with the ability to run across a variety of platforms as they work on one system remotely, and send data back through some reasonably universal format like html, JavaScript, JSON, or common file formats. Things like the Web Speech API are built into some browsers, but only a few, and Google seems to make a point of making a complex and valuable feature like this unavailable in Chromium, where one might try to look at what they do t...

As part of my Open Source course at Seneca College, I and my classmates were assigned an ongoing project to contribute to a mixture of repositories. The twist being that some of these repos would be ones maintained by classmates in the pursuit of developing interesting projects that we came up with in class. One of my classmates had two repositories, that other students seemed to like, and since I wanted to try my hand at trying to maintain a repo, I volunteered to help in that capacity. The idea for this repository was to create a speech recognition extension for Visual Studio Code that would transcribe certain voice commands into html code. For example if you were to say "div tag", to  your computer's microphone, it would print "<div " to the page, allowing out to add some attributes, and later close the tag through speech commands as well. As I mentioned, this was the idea of one of my classmates, and the repository can be found here . So far, I have f...