Voice Activated Controls

[jeff]

Jonathon Suggs wrote:
> Does anyone know of any software for natural language processing that
> could be ported to OM/Neo?  I really like some of the software that is
> available for the PocketPC (MS Voice Commander and Fonix).  They both
> run and work well on a resource limited platform as well, so it *can* be
> done, but both are closed.
> 
> Here are a couple of OS engines:
> http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/pocketsphinx/
> http://julius.sourceforge.jp/en_index.php?q=en/index.html
> http://xvoice.sourceforge.net/
> 
> So I guess, is there already any voice control software planned/worked
> on for use in OpenMoko?  If not, I'll help out, but can we get a project
> up and running?

I have tried sphinx a few times over the last few years (the project has been 
around for quite awhile). It never was great for continuous processing like 
dictating an email, but it worked fine if you gave it a set of commands and a 
limited dictionary.

pocketsphinx is already in openembedded and it compiles fine. OE is currently 
using pocketsphinx 0.2.1 and sphinxbase 0.1. The current upstream releases are 
pocketsphinx 0.3 and sphinxbase 0.2.1.   I bumped the version numbers in the 
*.bb files and they still compile fine. Now to actually test them on a neo 
someday... ;)

As for xvoice (which looks kind of abandoned), this pretty much sums it up: "In 
order to run xvoice, you will need a licensed version of ViaVoice for Linux."

Julius looks very nice, but they only have Japanese models at the moment.

I have also seen, in the long past, one that used the method suggested another 
place in this thread: you record a sample and when that sample is later 
detected it triggers a script. This is a different approach--no language 
models, not speaker independent, etc. But it is also quite flexible and 
typically pretty accurate. When I gave it a run years ago, the project I used 
sort of looked like a "one off" (e.g. a guy's weekend project later forgotten). 
Now if only I could remember it's name... ;)

So, in sum, sphinx is ready today though there are other options. It would be 
interesting to hear from other openembedded folks how well sphinx has worked on 
200MHz-ish ARM-like processors.

-Jeff   /    #jebba