Caster VS silero-vad

Unfortunately Dragon development has mostly stalled for the last 5 years (Dragon 15 was a leap forward but that was quite some time ago now).

You can still make use of it via Dragonfly (see also Caster[0]) as mentioned by a sibling comment or by using Talon[1] or Vocola.

Having used a computer 90% hands free for about a year and a half back in 2019, I chose Dragonfly then, but would probably choose Talon nowadays - less futsing about and it has alternative speech engine options.

I also recommend looking into eye tracking: the Tobii gaming products[2] work well for general computer mousing with some software like Talon or Precision Gaze[3] - well enough for me to make a hands free mod[4] for Factorio, for example.

[0]: https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/Caster

so I found this thing called Caster today that miiight save my job. it does allow you to format code with Dragon and navigate VS Code (albeit poorly.) It's also open-source, so you can add features.

>How do you detect speech starting and stopping?

https://github.com/snakers4/silero-vad

you could look into https://github.com/guillaumekln/faster-whisper especially the VAD section (Voice Activity Detector) using https://github.com/snakers4/silero-vad

I also had the same synchronization issue, so I wrote a WebUI/CLI that uses Silero-VAD that first splits the audio whenever there a silent portion (or every 30 seconds), and I haven't experienced it since:

By the way, I've updated the WebUI to now also support using Silero VAD to break up the audio into distinct sections, and run Whisper on each section and then combine them into one single transcript/SRT file.

The VAD is always available on Github

I also pinned some interesting comments here regarding mobile and IOT usage here - https://github.com/snakers4/silero-vad/issues/37