excuse me while i rant and daydream.
maybe someone will take the idea and run with it.

isn't it time we got working on a command line language that could be calmly and casually used by voice command?

ok ok, i know.. before everyone pitches in with the "but voice reccognition is notoriously skiffy to get to work... especially with local dialects" i'll pre-emptively counter with...

BUT COMMAND LINE IS DYING!



now though the niche of 'nix geeks who have been brought up on bash can do very well with command line, the majority of folks arn't likely to suddenly be motivated to learn it. and that is a problem for those of us who are learning or already ahead of the curve. do we want world of users stuck to something gooey? (gui)

i say sci fi has already shown us the way....

yep, it's another star trek analogy...

a rather obvious one.

lets make the command line so inteligent and plain english that gui becomes the one that's "too difficult to bother learning".


i dont see why this should be so hard... forget the voice reccognition for now. i'm just talking about getting a computer to reccognise plain english, and being able to talk back appropriately to anything you write... and "unreccognised command: argh you stupid computer" is not what i mean by appropriate response. i mean the computer can offer suggestions at least as to what to write to get your comand to do as you ask.

i hear there's great leaps n bounds been made in recent years on context searches.


Siljrath: "Computer"

Computer: "mhmm?"

Siljrath: "just for a laugh.... show me all videos where there's a woman wearing a red sweater."

Computer: "context search may take a few hours to complete. get a quantum computer. searching. more search results coming."

Siljrath: "oh, and find me that file i was working on a few days ago... the big purple image."

Computer: "here's your big purple image's last save, opened in GIMP."

Siljrath: "and while you're still searching, could you copy my Sabayon partition to the empty parition on my external hd?"

Computer: "your external sata doesnt have a empty partition. there's enough space. should i make one?"

Siljrath: "make it so."

Computer: "there are 78 methods for copying that meet with the specifications you have provided so far, please refine specifications or select a method"

Siljrath: "deedee".

Computer: "partitioning. copying will begin imedately after."

stuff like that.


how hard could it be to make a program that learns and interprets plain english comands into comands for the shell.

heh, its almost like i'm wanting a shell for the shell.


i say if gobo linux can do what it does and totally reorgansie the filesystem hierarchy, then the comands for clui should be no different.


i even came up with a name for my conceptware (vapourware): ush (usher shell, aka user shell)



lemme know what yas think. any constructive criticism. any suggestions, enhancements, augmentations, additions etc.
any tips on how to take the idea further and get it started.

...or is this already under way somewhere somehow.

mmm, productivity. mmmm, workflow.

Don't the Star Trek computers run with their own warp core? And how much programming time and knowledge would be required to write a computer that not only could understand and respond to spoken colloquial English, but could also deal with all the accents out there?

Also, why do you say that the command line is dying? Linux/Unix are the most prevalent OSes on the internet (server side at least) and even MS can't quite phase it out - on an MCSE course I looked at for W2k3, all gui commands had a command line equivalent given.

kinda overlooked alot of my caveats didnt you there. like when i said forget about the spoken part of it. yes yes, i know and already pre-emptively rebutted this thing about the english. how long would it take? eternity if all we ever do about it is question how hurculean task it is. less than a year if we ALL devoted ourselves to the task. like genetics, i feel this is a feild in which great leaps can be made rapidly. when everything said to a computer starts getting colated and analysed together, then perhaps we might have a chance. all previous voice reccognition software completely overlooked the power of the internets and were stand alone systems that were supposed to learn just from listening to one person, or however many were using the same workstation. ... hardly surprising we havn't covered much ground on this then is it.


um... warp core?

i cant tell if that was a serious comment or not.

wtf has the warp core got to do with the computer software?

warp core, correct me if i am wrong, is the source of power, and the piece of kit that makes creating a warp bubble possible.

Also, "why do you say that the command line is dying?"

well, not everyone who uses a computer takes an accademic or Information Technology & Comunications proffesional route. i'm talking about the swathes and swathes of regular users... maybe i just know too many joe-public windows users, but really, think about all the people you know who use a computer... what % of them are competent with a comand line (of any type)?
...and think back to about, say... 1988?
now was that % larger or smaller?

when i ask myself this question, i get the clear answer....

command line is dying!

it's going extinct for all but the elite technocrats. oh bolshevics, canst thou see? lol.

time echoes of russia?

ok, excuse my bizarre temporal mechanics humour tangent. probably far too obscure for anyone to "get" anyways.

but back to the main point of this thread....

a plain english shell?


i mean, when u read the begginers guide to bash, it does depict the shell as being in "plain english (mostly)"... which from my experience, it is not. its a rather extreme streatch of the imagination to even call it "broken english" (when comparing to other "boken english" variations around the world).

what i'm looking for is the means by which any commands that get binded/bound (?) are done so across the board for everyone.

i mean, this is not just english, this is any and all languages.

i'm sure someone is going to point out how if you start adding that many comands to the system, it would start getting extremely sluggish very early on. i'm certain there are numerous ways to get around this or at least soften the blow.

allow me to elaborate further on the vision:

if jimmy chong enters a command, it's automatically added to our universe wide database and remembered, so that next time anyone else anywhere around the world enters the same comand, the computer wont bother asking any silly questions to make sure it's been interpreted correctly.
muhamad biggles could enter the same command but means it differently, and set it up so. now there are two possible interpretations of the same command. the computer can now start to learn that which distinguishes which one was intended by the user. this may be the surrounding language, dialect, tonal intinations, geographic location... if insifficient data is available to make the disctintion, it's not rocket science... the computer can simply then ask which interpretation is prefered... to which the answer given is of course also added to the collective database.




i do hope that conveys what i am on about a little better, and with less room to get lost in my many tangents.

i think what your suggesting will happen, but it will be the computers shouting the orders at us.

besides, i think voice recognition is not such a great idea anyway, what happenes if youve got a sore throat, or your not a big talker? or your in a library or public place using a computer,? or simply at home its late and everyone else is in bed? you would wake them up. why do we need to have interaction with the shell at the speed of light anyway?. i just typed all this in via the keyboard in under 2 minutes. 20 minutes with edits lol, but still.

anyway you seem to have forgoten this voice recognition would just be a front-end itself, it would be the backend tools that will get the job done. so what if something goes wrong with the front-end, we can drop back to the commandline. commandline will never die. also, you wouldnt get anything more creative or useful done with voice rec, you'd just get the same sh*t at twice the speed, so probably end up with twice as much sh*t.

and the GUI at the moment is ample already. even granma can use KDE, we dont need to use EVERY new technological idea. and we dont also need to use all the ideas from star trek, im glad my door doesnt go "SSHHHHHH!" everytime i walk through it

i think the concept of voice recognition is good, but only really for niche areas, but in practice, your still going to have to learn how the back end tools work if you want full control, and that means reading and thinking, if you dont want to read and think, use KDE. the problem has already been solved imo.

Considering the number of times you failed to capitalize the first person pronoun "i" and the beginning of sentences, I wonder if English will die before the command line does. You may see some applications that will use voice input, probably starting with media apps, but commands you might have in a script would need to be too exact to be spoken, and too involved to be able to keep everything straight enough to input oral commands.

Yeah once we magically find all the answers to what the field of Artificial Intelligence has been trying to do for so long, I don't see why this should be so hard either.

I for one think that before we give birth to artificial intelligence, some other form of human computer interaction will be born. This is interesting. Hmmm.. maybe some sort of cyborg interface.

Have you heard about alice? http://www.alicebot.org/ It's pretty good, but for full functionality I think there's a lot more work to do.

Or and check out http://www.msdewey.com/ as well.

and what does this have to do with the integrity of my ideas? absolutely nothing. failing to capitalize "i" has got nothing to do with the issue.

because you do capitalize your "i's" does that make your ideas right? no it doesnt.

you seem to be a man concerned with spelling, whereas i am a man concerned with ideas. ive known plenty of people with perfect grammar who dont have any good ideas.

oh and by the way, this is an internet forum, not a hand written letter which would require the capitalization of "i". it was my ideas which i wanted to get across, not my spelling ability. language is a mere tool to convey ideas.

how can you expect to be taken seriously when your mind is focused on trivialitys such as grammar, when ideas should be the primary concern. (did i spell 'trivialitys' correctly? did you understand what i meant?).

Your post is about human to computer communication, but you expressed the idea using poor person to person communication skills. That was an irony which couldn't be ignored. I wasn't sure if you were even serious or if the post was intended as a joke.

If there is integrity in your ideas, then they deserve to be expressed (in written communition) is such a way that anyone who has learned the language in which you express those ideas may be able to read them without ambiguity or difficulty!

Spelling, punctuation, capitilization: they are all inportant to written communition. Indeed, the message may be rendered incomprehensible without them.

We do not have such difficulties with face-to-face verbal communition.

In written communication, if your ideas have merit, then respect them and express them properly so that others may properly understand your ideas.

Oh. My. Gosh.

The alice bot was mentioned -actually there is a better example based on AIML. The 'charlix' AIML data set includes pretty good administration capability for a debian box (I have done some mods to make it more generic). Of course AIML does what the OP asked about -turning natural, highly variable Englisg phrases and words into a simple, specific set of instructions.
However, the most difficult part of this idea is what the OP brushes of -that of speech recognition. There is a program called cvoicecontrol which can run commands which are spoken, but it doesn't recognize the language -it simply matches the utterances against a template(several actually), that each user must teach the program.
I do believe we'll get there someday, but deciding on the verbal syntax to equate with commands is the least of the worries -that of speech recognition is the hardest part -followed by speech synthesis. AIML goes a long way toward handling the lexical problems, but what is avialable is mostly in English. It will be a long time before we have language processing that can deal with such variances a slang, irony and poor syntax or poor translation and it will require significantly more processing power than home computers currently have. Our human ability to handle language and symbology is truly amazing and requires fantastic processing capability and a huge database. It's easy to see that many, perhaps most, humans with such capability still don't manage to use it to its' fullest... so it's hard to see how we could easily arrive at a point where machines would do this with any acceptable degree of accuracy.

No, I don't want to sit here talking to my computer (even if it could understand my Oldham accent, which some humans have difficulty doing ). I'd rather use the CLI or GUI, thanks.

well this is exactly the point isnt it, did my 'failure' to capitalize the letter "i" render my ideas incomprehensible? no it didnt, so your making the same mistake as jschiwal. i find it extraordinary that you both are ignoring the context. i was not communicating difficult ideas that need exact language to be understood, but you both seem to miss this entirey, and still place upmost importance on wether it should be "i" or "I".

dont you think i know that its proper to capitalize the "i"?! i just didnt think it was important, and i still dont, in this context.

also, i could pull you up on 'is such a way', but i wouldnt, because i understood the meaning, and i am not petty.

the real reason you couldnt ignore the irony was because you wanted to feel superior over someone else who you felt had more ideas than you did.

does that feel close to the truth?

your original post was very short with very few insightful practical ideas at all, indeed half your post was taken up belittling someones grammar, which was pettiness and unnecessary, and gives me an indication of what type of person you are. it seems your either as stated above, or you cant judge the context, and get hung up on small things which prevent you from seeing the bigger picture.

either way, i wouldnt want you on my team, you've wasted enough of my time on nonsense as it is.

you may wonder why i have gotten so animated over this issue, well i tell you. i look for the truth, anything else is almost irrelevant to me. i dont mind being questioned and even corrected on my ideas if my ideas are wrong, infact i welcome it. the most important thing to me is to find truth.

but there is no truth to be found in grammar.

Too bad this thread descended to flaming. However, the topic of the flames just illustrates one of my points -dealing with slight variations in language usage is no small matter for language processing software -especially for software that would carry out commands based on its' conclusions.
As an example relevant to the flaming context -most programming languages are case sensitive and would make a disitinction between and 'I' and a 'i'. While you could design a syntax parser that would treat them the same, you'd lose a certain amount of flexibility and precision by doing so.
Just try to imagine the amount of code it would take to translate:
"Go through all the files on your hard drive and list all the PDF's."
Even if we assume that the computer could understand what its' hard drive is -I mean that it would understand *which* drive, how about if someone else says:
"Loop over all the files..." or "Look through..." or "Show me..."
This is what AIML does a fair job at, but it takes an awful lot of lines of code which are very difficult to follow or modify -even if the spelling, grammar and syntax are perfect.
Still, I'd really recommend that the OP have a look at 'charlix' to see what has been done -the guy has even written AIML code which lety you teach it -that is, when it guesses something wrong you can tell it so. It then lets you correct it and produces new AIML code which reflects the changes.

The intentional use of sms grammar in a forum is rude. Almost as bad as posting in all CAPITAL letters.
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I read once about an early English/Russian language translation project. They tested is by translating the phrase "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." from English to Russian and back again. The result was "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten."

Besides understanding the sounds of words, the much harder part is dealing with context.