On libre backends for phony

Using the dragonfly backend

To use the dragonfly backend, you first need to require phony-dragonfly. Then, you need to set phony-export-function to phony-dragonfly-export. Then, do M-x phony-request-export, M-x phony-dragonfly-install-backend, and M-x phony-dragonfly-start-backend.

This should get you running with a libre backend using dragonfly with kaldi-active-grammar. However, because this solution works so-so, it hasn't seen much testing. This is reflected in the clumsy setup procedure.

Backend contribution

We need a speech-to-text engine that can be restrained to a formal grammar. My current hunch is that we could take an existing open-weight conformer model and perform a beam search on it. All languages defined in phony are regular, which may or may not make things more straightforward.

If you are interested in helping with creating a backend for phony, please get in touch! My matrix handle is @erkp:matrix.org, and my email is erik.prantare@gmail.com.