Need text to speech and speech recognition tools for Linux

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I'm planning on writing a program for Linux that uses text to speech and speech recognition. What are the best tools/libraries for this? Should I use Windows instead to be able to use better tools? The tools need to be easily callable from a console or C program.

Araucaria answered 18/5, 2009 at 12:33 Comment(0)

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For speech recognition there are the various Sphinxes. The different variants have different pros and cons, there is a comparison here Comparison of Sphinx versions. Sphinx 4 is Java, but the others are C, I believe.

Patchy answered 18/5, 2009 at 13:53 Comment(0)

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It depends quite a bit on what speech you are trying to recognize.

This is an article from 2005 that explains some of the difficulties in creating a dictation program: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~archan/personal/whyNoOpenSourceDictationDraft4.html . If you want that, the Julius speech recognition engine seems promising, but you will need to add your own acoustic and language models. You might be able to use the voxforge acoustic model.

If you are not trying to write a dictation program then you have a much easier task. Command programs have limited vocabularies, for example 'If you would like to continue in English, say "English"'.

I was able to get pretty good results using pocketsphinx and gstreamer to make a program that automatically edits most occurrences of the word "twitter" out of the TWiT podcast. It didn't work at all until I used my own language model based on transcripts of the podcast; the machine transcriptions from the speech recognizer are useless/hilarious but they do an okay job of finding the keyword.

Unreason answered 18/5, 2009 at 14:1 Comment(3)

do you have any experience with using pocketsphinx and gstreamer with the tcpserversrc/client? – Tericaterina 26/8, 2009 at 14:53

no, but gstpocketsphinx + tcpserversrc/sink shouldn't be any different than any other gstreamer element + tcpserversrc/sink. – Unreason 26/8, 2009 at 15:6

the link to your "twitterkiller" program appears to be broken. – Markhor 8/6, 2010 at 22:45

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For speech recognition there exists very little for linux. I were only aware of one apparently decent option, something IBM released some years ago but later was no longer made available (anyone knows if this ViaVoice SDK is still possible to get hold of from anywhere?). There are some more information about possible options at wikipedia.

Stepup answered 18/5, 2009 at 13:46 Comment(1)

ViaVoice SDK. It was never in full release, and the docs demanded a fairly narrow range on 2.4 kernel release numbers. I toyed around with it for taking some typing load off when I had intermittent tedonitis in my wrists, but no luck... – Necker 18/5, 2009 at 14:53

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I have used both Loquendo and Festival under linux. I would consider the festival voices I have used pretty poor, with very robotic synthesis. The Loquendo voices, on the other hand, are excellent - very high quality.

Rack answered 18/5, 2009 at 13:15 Comment(2)

If you are going to use Festival, you should install the alternate voices. Instructions (for debian/ubuntu) are here: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=677277 – Patchy 18/5, 2009 at 13:57

How was your experience with Loquendo? If you're up for it, I'd love to ask you a couple questions about it by email? – Rosyrot 17/7, 2010 at 7:54

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For Debian/Ubuntu text-to-speech there is also SVOX Pico:

sudo apt-get install libttspico-utils

Thurgau answered 13/8, 2014 at 13:24 Comment(0)

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I know espeak is a very good text-to-speech program for linux (it can even do different accents!), but I don't know of any speech recognition systems designed for UNIX.

Withdrawal answered 18/5, 2009 at 12:35 Comment(0)

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at&t fsm toolkit is also pretty awesome - no commercial use allowed though,

http://www.research.att.com/~fsmtools/fsm/

Tericaterina answered 26/8, 2009 at 14:55 Comment(0)

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This is a bit old but I saw that a fairly comprehensive guide on speech recognition on Hackaday a few days ago: http://hackaday.com/2010/07/09/get-started-with-speech-recognition/

Araucaria answered 11/7, 2010 at 22:24 Comment(0)

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http://simon-listens.org/ - simon open-source speech / voice recognition program

Methinks answered 4/1, 2011 at 13:34 Comment(0)

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And then there is mbrola for text to speech.

Gompers answered 4/1, 2011 at 13:40 Comment(0)

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Did you checked the HMM-based speech synthesis for text-to-speech. You can find the free demo on the website http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/. Installation will be little tedious.

Martlet answered 31/3, 2014 at 12:22 Comment(0)

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The original question was about finding suitable libraries, I know, but from as far as using speech recognition good enough for real dictation, there seems to be nothing out there for Linux (though I am sure it will change in time, I suspect it will take a while,as I am not sure that many people are interested).

At the moment I am trying to promote Dragon NaturallySpeaking as a supported product by CodeWeavers ... so if you are interested as a user it would help if you would cast a vote ...

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=8427

Agateware answered 24/3, 2011 at 0:30 Comment(0)

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