Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

greengeek · Last edited by greengeek on Wed 27 Nov 2013, 00:45; edited 4 times in total

Part 2 of my "chatterbox" project is aimed at getting a Puppy to monitor the microphone and listen to my response and create a text file which accurately reflects what I have spoken.

Part 1 and chatterbox project description here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=89258

Part 3 (Making puppy act on decoded commands) here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=89260

Progress so far is based on the 'pocketsphinx_continuous" .pet offered by technosaurus here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=88095&start=27
.

greengeek · Posted: Fri 11 Oct 2013, 17:36 Post subject:

reserved

greengeek · Posted: Fri 11 Oct 2013, 17:36 Post subject:

reserved

greengeek · Posted: Fri 11 Oct 2013, 17:37 Post subject:

reserved

greengeek · Posted: Fri 11 Oct 2013, 17:37 Post subject:

reserved

H4LF82 · Joined: 02 Oct 2012 Posts: 124

This is going to be the tough bit. Getting your computer to understand even one single word is tough enough, never mind the entire English language.

For these purposes, however, even the ability to discern between 2 words like "yes" and "no" would be extremely helpful.

Ive heard to try sphinx, verbio, ubuntu, and all manner and sorts of other things, but I have not had any luck with any of it. But I can tell you this much; I know when I am beaten, and there is a 6 month chunk of my life gone that I wont ever get back that I spent banging my head against this very wall (hindsight being 20/20, I'd avoid Sphinx if I were you), so by all means, please have a go at it...

I look forward to seeing what comes of it! Very Happy

greengeek · Posted: Fri 11 Oct 2013, 22:05 Post subject:

Sorry to hear of your experience with Sphinx - I was getting my hopes up this morning when technosaurus posted a pet of pocketsphinx
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=88095&start=27

Never mind, I will give it a go. As you say, teaching it the difference between "yes" and "no" is all that is required to make a start. To be honest I've read a few posts that suggest it is a mistake to use short words with STT - better to try to teach it the difference between "affirmative" and "not bloody likely" - apparently the longer phrases are easier to decode reliably.

greengeek · Posted: Sat 12 Oct 2013, 04:32 Post subject:

Well, I've been playing with pocketsphinx and it seems to be pretty good at decoding what I'm saying. I can certainly get it to distinguish yes and no with excellent reliability. Surprisingly it also seems very good (sometimes) at assembling entire sentences - although the accuracy does vary if the room has background noise.

I found that the program itself was extremely sensitive to mic volume and it was necessary for me turn the capture volume right DOWN to almost nothing, and to turn OFF the 20db mic boost which is usually a necessity with all other audio programs like mhwaveedit etc. Quite surprising.

The problem is what to do with the output of the recognition program? I can see the decoded speech in the terminal but how to feed it to a text file in real time??

Technosaurus mentioned the following tutorial:
http://hackaday.com/2010/07/11/adding-speach-recognition-to-your-embedded-platform/
and one of the comments was as follows:

H4LF82 · Joined: 02 Oct 2012 Posts: 124

if we can practice on Lucid ill give it a go...

gimme a few to get caffiene and im on it...

greengeek · Posted: Sat 12 Oct 2013, 13:28 Post subject:

What version of Lucid are you using? (could you post the bottom few lines of your /etc/DISTRO_SPECS file?

H4LF82 · Joined: 02 Oct 2012 Posts: 124

lucid 5.2.8

H4LF82 · Joined: 02 Oct 2012 Posts: 124

if you would confirm that sphinx plays well with lucid ( i.e. no smoking HDD's) then i will give it another try. i may have had an old version last time...

greengeek · Posted: Sat 12 Oct 2013, 14:01 Post subject:

When the decoded speech is extracted I thought it would be useful to have it placed into a text file called something like chatdump or voicedump or something like that - the stream of text would flow in as the user spoke, and maybe the file would need to be cleared every 3 seconds or so.

When Puppy was ready to assess the users answer to a question it would go looking at the chatdump and view the last word (or words if appropriate).

If the user was busy chatting to other people in the room this chatter would be discarded after 3 seconds, and then when it came time to answer a Puppy question the user would reach a natural break in their conversation and the chatdump would just contain their answer to that question.

Just tossing ideas into the mix....

H4LF82 · Joined: 02 Oct 2012 Posts: 124

we are of one mind here. While I can see the merit of piping the stdout using python and then continuing in python, i would prefer to stay in the shallow end with my water wings and just write the stdout to a txt file which can then be bash-ed into submission. I can write a monitor-script to check the bash file for changes every few seconds and when they are detected, to act on them appropriately.

Arguably not as elegant as a singular python script, but i think it will do the job. Luckily there are many ways to skin a cat programmatically Smile

greengeek · Posted: Sat 12 Oct 2013, 15:53 Post subject:

I've just booted into a live session of Lupu 528 and can confirm that pocketsphinx works fine.
(Interestingly I did not need to wind down the mic volume in Lupu the way I did on Upup. It worked fine in Lupu without any changes).

Steps as follows:
1) Download technosaurus pocketsphinx pet from here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=88095&start=27
2) Install the pet
3) Create a new directory of /usr/share/pocketsphinx (we will be using this later...)
4) Download the other source files referred to by technoasurus from this link:
http://hivelocity.dl.sourceforge.net/project/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx/0.8/pocketsphinx-0.8.tar.gz
5) Extract these files in your download directory and copy the "model" directory from the source into the /usr/share/pocketsphinx directory created above. (ie it becomes /usr/share/pocketsphinx/model)
6) Go into /usr/bin, rightclick in the open space and choose "window, terminal here"
7) Type: #./pocketsphinx_continuous
You should see sphinx set itself up and eventually show a "Ready" prompt. At that point you can speak into your microphone and you should see it say "listening..." and then once you stop speaking it will try to decode what you said.

Try saying "negative" or "affirmative" - I found the detection of those words to be 100% accurate if I used an American accent (ie: roll the r slightly in affirmative, just like Mr Spock would have.)

(The biggest problem is I keep spelling "shpinx" wrong a million times).