CMUSphinx for Golang

cmusphinx logo

Intro

CMUSphinx collects over 20 years of the CMU research. All advantages are hard to list, but just to name a few:

  • State of art speech recognition algorithms for efficient speech recognition. CMUSphinx tools are designed specifically for low-resource platforms;
  • Flexible design;
  • Focus on practical application development and not on research;
  • Support for several languages like US English, UK English, French, Mandarin, German, Dutch, Russian and ability to build a models for others;
  • BSD-like license which allows commercial distribution;
  • Active development and release schedule;
  • Active community (more than 400 users on Linkedin CMUSphinx group);
  • Wide range of tools for many speech-recognition related purposes (keyword spotting, alignment, pronuncation evaluation).

This project

The main aim of the pocketsphinx-go project is to bring all those features to the Go programming language. Firstly, by leveraging awesome cgogen framework I was able to create full-featured bindings to the pocketsphinx core library and sphinxbase just in a few hours of config tweaking. Secondly, I added a high-level wrapper package on top of that so users won't be bothered too much by rough API and lack of documentation in godoc. The code is from the edge of both upstreams, so any new features added like yesterday will be automatically there in no time.

Package pocketsphinx provides Go bindings for pocketsphinx, one of Carnegie Mellon University's open source large vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition engine. Pocketsphinx is a library that depends on another library called SphinxBase which provides common functionality across all CMUSphinx projects. All the binding code has automatically been generated with rules defined in pocketsphinx.yml. This tries to cover as much as possible of the API, if you missing some method or type you'd like to see here — just create an issue and it'll be there.

Examples of use: sphinx/lattice.go, and others from the sphinx package.

package sphinx GoDoc

fsgfefeat

Examples of use: gortana/main.go.

Installation

In order to start experimenting with sphinx you need to install the latest version from sources, do not use any pre-packaged versions as the latest stable release was in 2008 and since then they continiuously working on the software in "pre-alpha" mode, that means the master branch in the upstream. So installation is simple, just follow their instaructions.

In both cases it can be done like this:

./autogen.sh
make
make install

And finally get the sphinx package:

$ go get github.com/xlab/pocketsphinx-go/sphinx

pkg-config

Example

There is an example program called gortana that simply listens to your speech in continious mode and triest to recognize something. I haven't managed to recognize "gopher" but any common-ish sentences it gets right, the stock HMM, LM and Dict are good. For input it uses portaudio-go. So you will need to get portaudio installed first.

$ brew install portaudio
$ go get github.com/xlab/pocketsphinx-go/example/gortana
$ gortana --help
 __
/ _  _  _|_ _  _  _
\__)(_)| |_(_|| )(_|

Usage: gortana [OPTIONS]

Goratana is a dumb personal assistant to test how CMUSphinx works from Golang.

Options:
  --hmm="/usr/local/share/pocketsphinx/model/en-us/en-us"                 Sets directory containing acoustic model files.
  --dict="/usr/local/share/pocketsphinx/model/en-us/cmudict-en-us.dict"   Sets main pronunciation dictionary (lexicon) input file..
  --lm="/usr/local/share/pocketsphinx/model/en-us/en-us.lm.bin"           Sets word trigram language model input file.
  --log="gortana.log"                                                     Log file to write log to.
  --stdout=false                                                          Disables log file and writes everything to stdout.
  --outraw=""                                                             Specify output dir for RAW recorded sound files (s16le). Directory must exist.

/usr/local
$ ffplay -f s16le -ar 16000 -ac 1 -i out/000000000.raw

$ play -r 16k -e signed-integer -b 16 -c 1 out/000000000.raw

Rebuilding the package

You will need to get the c-for-go tool installed first.

$ git clone https://github.com/xlab/pocketsphinx-go && cd pocketsphinx-go
$ make clean
$ make

Contributing

[]*

License

All the code except when stated otherwise is licensed under the MIT license.