kaylee

Kaylee

Kaylee is a somewhat fancy speech recognizer that will run commands and perform other functions when a user speaks loosely preset sentences. It is based on Blather by Jezra, but adds a lot of features that go beyond the original purpose of Blather.

Requirements

1. pocketsphinx
2. gstreamer-1.0 (and what ever plugin has pocketsphinx support)
3. gstreamer-1.0 base plugins (required for ALSA)
4. python-gobject (required for GStreamer and the GTK-based UI)

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 Kaylee (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 GTK UI, 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 Kaylee without needing to enter command line options all the time, copy options.json.tmp to ~/.config/blather/options.json 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.

Kaylee now updates the language automatically. You should never need to run language_updater.sh manually.

Examples

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

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

• To have Kaylee pass the matched sentence to the executed 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