Hello everyone! I am interested in replacing the Google Speech Recognition and Synthesis app on Android. For Speech-to-Text (STT), I've tried Whisper and FUTO, and settled on the latter because it seemed to be more versatile. Also, FUTO seems to have some decent recognition, but not yet capable of handling all the languages that I want. Regardless, so far happy with STT. The only annoyance I have is that it does not appear as an option in the settings for Speech recognition :(

However, I can't seem to find any replacements that have good Text-to-Speech (TTS) quality. I tried espeak-ng and RHVoice, but both have robotic outputs.

Given the recent advancements in AI, I was expecting that there would be ways to incorporate open source TTS models like Kokoro to generate speech on the go. Nevertheless, I could not really find any such apps so far.

Has anyone managed to completely replace the Google app with (an)other privacy-focused FOSS app(s)?

Archive link: https://archive.ph/ICJZZ

Until now, the EU has allowed a majority of countries to rely on American big tech companies for communication and storage of sensitive data. For example, many universities across Europe rely on Google or Microsoft for email services, research data storage, and department communication. Similarly, many of them write their research using Microsoft Word, which could be used by these big companies to train their own AI models.

A majority of regular citizens rely on Meta for instant messaging apps (WhatsApp), Facebook, Instagram, but also on X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok. None of these apps are properly regulated even with EU's efforts, leaving people unshielded to other states' attempts at polarization. There is also the problem of mass profiling of users, which is used to supply targeted advertisements and sometimes influence public opinion on certain topics (cough Musk tweaking the Twitter algorithm to promote AfD cough).

The article that I supplied focuses mainly on the aspect of maintaining data privacy when our data is harvested by outside entities. However, this is, in my opinion, a horrible approach. We need to move everything ASAP to open source alternatives, and preferably EU based ones. Some attempts at this have been previously made in Germany, which should give hope to other countries in the EU.

The cost of moving away from Google/Microsoft tech stacks will be a drop in the bucket compared to the wealth that these companies extract from EU. Similarly, offering alternatives to social media like Friendica, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and perhaps PeerTube, would be a huge win against disinformation and propaganda from other countries.

If the recent events are not a catalyst to push everyone away from US software in the EU, I do not know what else will. Do you think that this would be possible at all?

Hi! I'm trying to archive papers as soon as they appear in a scientific journal, and I've attempted to search for PDF links on each page using some regular web scraping.

The problem is that most of these journals will add their fancy PDF readers, and downloading the file is not as straight-forward as it seems. However, the Zotero Connector works flawlessly when you trigger the extension. Therefore, I attempted to set up a selenium instance with this extension to download the papers given a link, but I struggle to actually get the extension to trigger. I tried sending a Shift + Ctrl + S command, but that doesn't seem to get picked up. Similarly, I can't figure out how to call the extension from the console.

Did anyone else attempt such a workflow before? Am I doing something completely unnecessary, as there are better options available? Help a fellow sailor out. Thanks a lot in advance for your help!

I recently discovered that Redox OS got a new release earlier this month. I'm quite surprised how far they managed to get, given that only a handful of people are working on this project (compared to the Linux kernel).

Now, I'm curious what it would take to get bigger players to focus on this project. Given the recent Linux + Rust drama, it would surprise me if the backers of Rust for Linux would not give this project some attention.

Hello everyone! I've been playing around with Wayland for a bit and was hoping to start learning some more about it. For example, I would be interested in making a lock screen, similar to Swaylock, as a toy project.

What GUI toolkit would you use to develop apps on Wayland? I've added a little poll below with some of the popular choices I've seen thrown around. Feel free to add your own suggestions and maybe leave a comment as to why you'd use that!

Link to poll

As the title implies, should I do it? I love Arch so far, and I can fix most issues that pop out. However, I sometimes wish to start fresh without too much hassle, but I get a feeling NixOS isn't as mature as Arch.

Have any of you used both, and if so, what do you miss from Arch? What are you grateful for in NixOS?

Hi everyone! I'll soon take the DP-100 exam for Microsoft Azure, and I was interested in finding more leaked exam questions. At the moment, I was using examtopics for this, but it sucks because it basically cuts you off halfway through.

I heard there are some private trackers that specialize in exam questions, such as LearnFlakes, but I do not have anyone that can invite me to them. Therefore, I was wondering if there is another way to find the information I need for this exam.

Do you know any other sources that are fully free?