Python for Speech Recognition | Speech to Text |
PyAudio (for microphone users)
PyAudio is required if and only if you want to use microphone input (Microphone). PyAudio version 0.2.11+ is required, as earlier versions have known memory management bugs when recording from microphones in certain situations.
If not installed, everything in the library will still work, except attempting to instantiate a Microphone object will raise an AttributeError.
The installation instructions on the PyAudio website are quite good - for convenience, they are summarized below:
On Windows, install PyAudio using Pip: execute pip install pyaudio in a terminal.
On Debian-derived Linux distributions (like Ubuntu and Mint), install PyAudio using APT: execute sudo apt-get install python-pyaudio python3-pyaudio in a terminal.
If the version in the repositories is too old, install the latest release using Pip: execute sudo apt-get install portaudio19-dev python-all-dev python3-all-dev && sudo pip install pyaudio (replace pip with pip3 if using Python 3).
On OS X, install PortAudio using Homebrew: brew install portaudio. Then, install PyAudio using Pip: pip install pyaudio.
On other POSIX-based systems, install the portaudio19-dev and python-all-dev (or python3-all-dev if using Python 3) packages (or their closest equivalents) using a package manager of your choice, and then install PyAudio using Pip: pip install pyaudio (replace pip with pip3 if using Python 3).
PyAudio wheel packages for common 64-bit Python versions on Windows and Linux are included for convenience, under the third-party/ directory in the repository root. To install, simply run pip install wheel followed by pip install ./third-party/WHEEL_FILENAME (replace pip with pip3 if using Python 3) in the repository root directory.
PocketSphinx-Python (for Sphinx users)
PocketSphinx-Python is required if and only if you want to use the Sphinx recognizer (recognizer_instance.recognize_sphinx).
PocketSphinx-Python wheel packages for 64-bit Python 2.7, 3.4, and 3.5 on Windows are included for convenience, under the third-party/ directory. To install, simply run pip install wheel followed by pip install ./third-party/WHEEL_FILENAME (replace pip with pip3 if using Python 3) in the SpeechRecognition folder.
On Linux and other POSIX systems (such as OS X), follow the instructions under “Building PocketSphinx-Python from source” in Notes on using PocketSphinx for installation instructions.
Note that the versions available in most package repositories are outdated and will not work with the bundled language data. Using the bundled wheel packages or building from source is recommended.
See Notes on using PocketSphinx for information about installing languages, compiling PocketSphinx, and building language packs from online resources. This document is also included under reference/pocketsphinx.rst.
Google API Client Library for Python (for Google Cloud Speech API users)
Google API Client Library for Python is required if and only if you want to use the Google Cloud Speech API (recognizer_instance.recognize_google_cloud).
If not installed, everything in the library will still work, except calling recognizer_instance.recognize_google_cloud will raise an RequestError.
According to the official installation instructions, the recommended way to install this is using Pip: execute pip install google-api-python-client (replace pip with pip3 if using Python 3).
Alternatively, you can perform the installation completely offline from the source archives under the ./third-party/Source code for Google API Client Library for Python and its dependencies/ directory.
FLAC (for some systems)
A FLAC encoder is required to encode the audio data to send to the API. If using Windows (x86 or x86-64), OS X (Intel Macs only, OS X 10.6 or higher), or Linux (x86 or x86-64), this is already bundled with this library - you do not need to install anything.
Otherwise, ensure that you have the flac command line tool, which is often available through the system package manager. For example, this would usually be sudo apt-get install flac on Debian-derivatives, or brew install flac on OS X with Homebrew.
Monotonic for Python 2 (for faster operations in some functions on Python 2)
On Python 2, and only on Python 2, if you do not install the Monotonic for Python 2 library, some functions will run slower than they otherwise could (though everything will still work correctly).
On Python 3, that library’s functionality is built into the Python standard library, which makes it unnecessary.
This is because monotonic time is necessary to handle cache expiry properly in the face of system time changes and other time-related issues. If monotonic time functionality is not available, then things like access token requests will not be cached.
To install, use Pip: execute pip install monotonic in a terminal.