Re: MobileOrg and Voice Capturing (Android)

[Mark Elston <m_elston@comcast.net>]

Have you looked at sl4a (formerly ase)?  With it you can
start Intents and perform clipboard operations plus file
manipulations using a standard scripting language like
perl, python, or ruby (among others).  This might be
very useful.

Mark

On 11/28/2010 11:10 AM, Sven Bretfeld wrote:
> Hi together
>
> TextToSpeech has made our lives easier, especially for car-drivers like
> me. I have tried to capture tasks by voice on my Android device and
> implement them automatically to my org-files at home. The results are
> practicable but far from optimal by now. Maybe there are some Android
> users on this list who like to get involved in trying to find an optimal
> solution.
>
> *My method at the moment:*
>
> I use "tasker," the Android killer-app for automatizing almost every
> thinkable task. Created a new task called "org-voice" with tasker.
> Pressing the associated icon does the following:
>
> 1. Plays Darth Vader's voice saying "What is thy bidding, my master?"
>
> 2. Loads app Voice2Clipboard
>
> 3. Waits for 30 seconds (to get Voice2Clipboard ready for recording and
>     for me to finish speaking the note)
>
> 4. Write File: Writes the clipboard content to a file
>     /sdcard/dropbox/org/org-voice.org
>
> After uploading the file with Dropbox, a cronjob on my PC (which is
> always switched on) takes care of the file. Its lines (each is a capture
> item) are transformed by a series of sed operations and put into a
> different file from-org-voice.org together with some TAGS and a TODO
> keyword; after that the original file is emptied. That's it.
>
> The problem with this approach is that you still have to manually
> download the (empty) capture-file (org-voice.org)[¹] and to manually upload
> it again, because Dropbox for Android doesn't sync changed files on the
> sdcard automatically. And especially to upload process needs quite a
> view clicks.
>
> *What would be better:*
>
> Use MobileOrg and have the clipboard contents written into the file used
> by MobileOrg for written captures. This is
> /sdcard/mobileorg/mobileorg.org if you use sdcard-storage. This way, you
> could use MobileOrg's own syncing process and no cronjob would be
> necessary.
>
> This could be done in two ways:
>
> 1. Use the same procedure and let tasker write the contents into the
>     file directly. This is not possible for me since I have to use
>     internal-storage for reasons of performance[²] and the files in
>     /data/data/com.matburt.mobileorg/files/ are not writable for other
>     programs without root.
>
> 2. Use tasker to start MobileOrg, enter the capture dialog and have a
>     voice recognition app started. I simply don't know how to do that.
>
> Maybe tasker can even be programmed to automatically start MobileOrg's
> syncing process from time to time. But I don't know if and how this is
> possible.
>
> Does anybody have a better solution? Or a better idea?
>
> Greetings,
>
> Sven
>
> [¹]  If you don't, the next sync with dropbox would replace the file
> with your notes by the empty file hosted on the Dropbox server.
> [²]  On HTC Magic (Android 1.6) sdcard-storage makes MobileOrg
> incredibly slow. It takes more than a minute after starting MobileOrg
> until the files are displayed.
>