Local offline processing vs. network service

[garrett]

Firstly: I love Frog. It's great!

However: It's not clear how much local processing Frog does versus having to use network services.

From what I've seen in the code and in practice:

• the bulk of Frog works all offline thanks to Tesseract
• text to speech uses an online service
• language packs need network connectivity to download

At the moment, there's no indication what requires network connection, and Frog doesn't adapt based on network connectivity. (That is: without network, OCR works, but TTS and language downloads silently fail.)

In addition to having network detection, it would be excellent to make it clear that it mainly offline OCR both in the app and on "marketing" such as the README, website, and Flathub.

It would also be excellent to have offline TTS. (Another app on Flathub, Speech Note does this and might serve as a decent example — even if it's Qt-based.)

This is a lot of asks for one issue but if you agree I'd suggest:

1. Treating this issue as transparency within the app and in the docs.
2. Opening another issue for offline TTS.
3. Opening another issue for offline detection. (Although Language pack download fails #145 would probably suffice for offline detection for downloading language packs? Not sure if TTS could be handled in the same future PR or if that'd require another issue too.)

Thanks again for such an awesome app!

[amka]

Hey @garrett! First of all, thank you!

1. I agree that the usage network for STT should be described somehow in the docs, website, or even in the app on the first use.
2. Maybe you're right and mentioning the offline nature of OCR should be promoted. Easy to change, hard to validate, but why not? :)
3. Network detection and connection issues are one of the next parts of the job. I'm trying to put it all in the next release. There is a related issue Language pack download fails #145
4. As for the Offline TTS - I tested some solutions and they were awful. So I switched to online service for some time. Once I find an offline solution I'll replace the current one.

[amka]

Yet it definitely not what I want to give my users 😉

Source