Contributing
There are many ways to contribute to Dragonfly. They are documented in this file.
Reporting bugs/other issues
If you come across bugs or other issues with Dragonfly, you can open a new issue in the issue tracker.
If the issue is a bug, make sure you describe what you expected to happen as well as what actually happened. Include a full traceback if there was an exception.
Submitting patches/pull requests
If you have changes that can resolve an issue in the issue tracker, you can create a pull request to merge your changes with the master branch.
Documentation changes
There are parts of Dragonfly that are undocumented as well as, undoubtedly, documented functionality which is poorly explained, out of date or incorrect. If you notice problems with the documentation, you can open a new issue in the issue tracker.
Dragonfly’s documentation is written in the reStructuredText format. ReStructuredText is similar to the Markdown format. If you are unfamiliar with the format, the reStructuredText primer might be a good starting point.
The Sphinx documentation engine and Read the Docs are used to generate documentation from the .txt files in the documentation/ folder. Docstrings in the source code are included in a semi-automatic way through use of the sphinx.ext.autodoc extension.
To build the documentation locally, install Sphinx and any other documentation requirements:
$ cd documentation
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
Then run the following command on Windows to build the documentation:
$ make.bat html
Or use the Makefile on other systems:
$ make html
If there were no errors during the build process, open the build/html/index.html file in a web browser. Make changes, rebuild the documentation and reload the doc page(s) in your browser as you go.
Improving spoken language support
Dragonfly supports using various languages with speech recognition engines. Language-specific code is located in sub-packages under dragonfly.language and loaded automatically when dragonfly.language is imported.
English is fully supported with mappings from English words to characters,
integers (e.g. for IntegerRef) and time/date formats.
Other languages such as German and Dutch only have mappings for using
IntegerRef (and similar) elements.
Contributing New Speech Recognition Engines
Introduction and Criteria
Contribution of new Dragonfly speech recognition engine implementations is welcome, provided certain criteria are met. New implementations must:
be as functional as the current engines
have some significant advantage over the current engines, perhaps in terms of accuracy, speed, CPU/memory requirements and/or platform support
have a willing maintainer or require little maintenance
Before setting out to implement a new Dragonfly engine, please know that it is difficult to achieve the first criterion on functionality. Dragonfly’s feature set requires a very specific type of speech recognition engine. Namely, it must be one which supports each of the following features:
definition of voice commands in a grammar format
efficient and dynamic activation and deactivation of (parts of) grammars at the beginning of an utterance
in-speech transition between dictated prose (dictation mode), loaded voice commands (command mode) and vice versa
Each Dragonfly engine supports features one and two. All engines support feature three except the CMU Pocket Sphinx engine. However, Sphinx is only limited in that dictated prose must be spoken in separate utterances.
These three requirements have effectively ruled out Dragonfly support for most speech recognition engines that users have asked about in the past. This is not meant to discourage those wishing to contribute new implementations, it is simply a fact.
As for the second and third criteria listed above, they are fairly self-explanatory. There is no sense in contributing a new engine that brings nothing new to the table and this library’s maintainer does not wish to substantially increase the effort needed to keep things working.
New SR Engine Guide
TODO