I’d like to +1 on Suelen’s idea. My wife and her sister have Parkinsons disease and they use siri for sending every message and email. I watch and reflect on the details of their use every day and think of how non-disabled folk could also better interact with their software via voice.
While Discourse is great on many fronts, it’s primary differentiator to old BBS systems is that it works well on phones and tablets as well as in the browser. And phones are primarily voice devices.
If I were to create a test suite for what Discourse needs to be in 2030-35 it would include the ability to go to a discourse site with a phone and just navigate the community aurally. Ideally one could navigate it’s categories and threads via just voice and audio and text to speech the content when requested.
Far more important than ai and much simpler to do. And while every device will have it’s own way of transcribing speech to text and correct mistakes, you don’t want to rely on these systems being good, free or consistent if you can help it.
It would be a huge feature because Discourse has so much to it, and I’m curious what the costs of the transcriptions would be like, but I think it really is a very worthwhile suggestion to look into.