kaylee

Blather

Blather is a speech recognizer that will run commands when a user speaks preset sentences.

Requirements

1. pocketsphinx
2. gstreamer-0.10 (and what ever plugin has pocket sphinx support)
3. gstreamer-0.10 base plugins (required for alsa)
4. pyside (only required for the Qt based UI)
5. pygtk (only required for the Gtk based UI)
6. pyyaml (only required for reading the options file)
   

Note: it may also be required to install pocketsphinx-hmm-en-hub4wsj

Usage

1. move commands.tmp to ~/.config/blather/commands.conf and fill the file with sentences and command to run
2. Run Blather.py, this will generate ~/.config/blather/sentences.corpus based on sentences in the ‘commands’ file
3. quit blather (there is a good chance it will just segfault)
4. go to http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/tools/lmtool.html and upload the sentences.corpus file
5. download the resulting XXXX.lm file to the ~/.config/blather/language directory and rename to file to ‘lm’
6. download the resulting XXXX.dic file to the ~/.config/blather/language directory and rename to file to ‘dic’
7. run Blather.py
   • for Qt GUI, run Blather.py -i q
   • for Gtk GUI, run Blather.py -i g
   • to start a UI in ‘continuous’ listen mode, use the -c flag
   • to use a microphone other than the system default, use the -m flag
8. start talking

Note: to start Blather without needing to enter command line options all the time, copy options.yaml.tmp to ~/.config/blather/options.yaml and edit accordingly.

Bonus

once the sentences.corpus file has been created, run the language_updater.sh script to automate the process of creating and downloading language files.

Examples

• To run blather with the GTK UI and start in continuous listen mode:
  ./Blather.py -i g -c

• To run blather with no UI and using a USB microphone recognized and device 2:
  ./Blather.py -m 2

• To have blather pass the matched sentence to the executing command:
  ./Blather.py -p

  explanation: if the commands.conf contains:
  good morning world : example_command.sh
  then 3 arguments, ‘good’, ‘morning’, and ‘world’ would get passed to example_command.sh as
  example_command.sh good morning world

• To run a command when a valid sentence has been detected:
  ./Blather.py --valid-sentence-command=/path/to/command
  note: this can be set in the options.yml file

• To run a command when a invalid sentence has been detected:
  ./Blather.py --invalid-sentence-command=/path/to/command
  note: this can be set in the options.yml file

Finding the Device Number of a USB microphone

There are a few ways to find the device number of a USB microphone.

• cat /proc/asound/cards
• arecord -l