[ytjohn]

I first learned about CMUSphinx from the [Jasper Project](https://jasperproject.github.io/). While Jasper provided an image for the Pi, I decided to go ahead and make a scripted install of CMUSphinx. I spent something like 2 frustrating days attempting to get it installed by hand in a repeatable fashion before giving up.

This was 2 years ago, so maybe it's simple now, but I didn't find it "amazingly easy" back then.

I do have a number of projects where I could definitely use a local speech recognition library. I have used [Python SpeechRecognition](https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition/blob/master/exam...) to essentially record and transcribe from a scanner. I wanted to take it further, but google at the time limited the number of requests per day. Today's announcement seems to indicate they will be expanding their free usage, but a local setup would be much better. I'd like to deploy this in a place that might not have reliable Internet.

[uberi]

In my experiences, the issues with building CMU Sphinx are mainly unspecified dependencies, undocumented version requirements, and forgetting to sacrifice the goat when the MSVC redistributable installer pops up.

We've written detailed, up-to-date instructions [1] for installing CMU Sphinx, and now also provide prebuilt binaries [2]!

If you're interested in not sending your audio to Google, CMU Sphinx and other libraries (like Kaldi and Julius), are definitely worth a second look.

[1] https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition/blob/master/refe... [2] https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition/tree/master/thir...

[dr_zoidberg]

Yeah I'm gonna leave a reply here just in case I need to find this again (already opened tabs, but you never know). This might be big for a stalled project at work. If this can un-stall that, I'll sure owe you a beer ;)

[hardwaresofton]

Would you mind submitting this documentation to CMU? I get the feeling they'd love to at least host a link to them or something to enhance their own documentation?

[ytjohn]

Thanks for providing this. Will definitely give it a fresh look.

[simcop2387]

That sounds like my experience with it from about 5 years ago or so. I gave up on it also. It also didn't help that CMUSphinx has had more than one version in development in different languages.

[hardwaresofton]

I would note that as a positive... But yeah, 5 years ago things were much much rougher (which is partly why I didn't think it got so much press).

But these days, if you go all the way through their tutorial, and give it a proper read, it's very doable to set up.

[sebak]

Unfortunately, the situation hasn't improved much. Besides, even if you get it set up, the quality of the recognition isn't even close to the one from Google.