Speech To Text in Android using Xamarin

On this fine day of Teacher’s Day, my mentor from Aditi asked me if I know any samples on creating a simple app for Speech to Text recognition in Android. I searched on the net but did not find much result. So then I thought, why not I create a sample, push it in Git and send him the link.

So after an hour the sample was done and pushed to Git. Xamarin allows the use of Android APIs to be utilized in a very easy way.

In just few lines of code I was able to use the RecognizerIntent to launch an activity that will prompt the user for speech and send it through a speech recognizer. The results will be returned via activity results in the event handler OnActivityResult.

The sample can be downloaded and used as is from here.

Share Mouse and Keyboard using ShareMouse

 

As a developer you tend to have multiple desktops or laptops with multiple monitors. Controlling each of these systems with their own keyboards and mouse is sometime tiresome and has some kind of limitations that can be considered as an advantage using some of the Screen Sharing software.

It becomes very tedious sometimes, if you want to copy paste some text but because of no clipboard sharing, you will either send that text in email or try to ping yourself somewhere to get the text. It becomes much more worse if you have to share the file. For these, I was using TeamViewer where I can ping my machine and send the text or I can connect in FileTransfer mode to share the file.

Now, I have installed and using this amazing software ShareMouse. It seems to have some unique features which other softwares do not provide. Some of the features that I like are:

  • Works with both Windows and Mac
  • Easily detects other clients
  • No concept of server or client – You can easily use either machine’s keyboard or mouse for the purpose
  • Allows multiple monitor support
  • Allows Clipboard sharing
  • Allows files haring via drag and drop
  • Screen switch as if it’s an extended display.

If you have not tried it out, you can always do that here. The free version is good enough if you are just using two machines as it provides the clipboard sharing functionality as well.

Will review some more softwares and write about them in the future posts.