Troubleshooting

1. Talon does nothing when I speak
2. Talon crashes during use
3. Talon seems to do the wrong thing all the time
4. Talon has to be restarted for changes in configuration to take effect

Talon does nothing when I speak

• Check the microphone Talon selected, it’s at the start of the log
  e.g. 2020-03-04 15:27:53 INFO Activating Microphone: "Yeti Nano Analogue Stereo"

If it’s the wrong one, use the menu in the app tray to change it.

• Check your speech engine has initialised by looking at the log e.g.
  2020-03-04 15:28:05 INFO (SpeechSystem) Activating speech engine: W2lEngine(en_US)

If you’re on Linux or Mac (without dragon), make sure you have set up wav2letter.

Check you have some valid commands in ~/.talon/user. If it’s empty clone https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon and try saying the alphabet

“air bat cap drum”.

Talon crashes during use

Report it! Talon should recover from most errors itself, but if it crashes report it in Slack with the output log.

Originally published by @hbk619 https://github.com/hbk619/talon-docs/blob/master/faq.md.

Talon seems to do the wrong thing all the time

Make sure that you are in the correct mode. knausj_talon has two modes: command mode and dictation mode.

• Use dictation mode for free-form speech dictation, like writing an email. (Switch by saying “dictation mode”.)
• Use command mode for everything else, including dictating individual letters or writing code. (Switch by saying “command mode”.)

Talon has to be restarted for changes in configuration to take effect

Talon automatically tracks changes to files in ~/.talon/user, so that one can change scripts on the fly. This breaks if ~/.talon (or any other part of the path) is a symlink. On Linux, this can be fixed by replacing the symlink by a bind mount:

rm ~/.talon; mkdir ~/.talon  # or whichever part is a symlink
sudo mount --bind /path/to/dot/dir ~/.talon

This can be made permanent by adding the following line to /etc/fstab:

/path/to/dot/dir	/home/<user>/.talon	none	bind