Getting started with speech recognition and python

If you really want to understand speech recognition from the ground up, look for a good signal processing package for python and then read up on speech recognition independently of the software.

But speech recognition is an extremely complex problem (basically because sounds interact in all sorts of ways when we talk). Even if you start with the best speech recognition library you can get your hands on, you'll by no means find yourself with nothing more to do.

Pocketsphinx is also a good alternative. There are Python bindings provided through SWIG that make it easy to integrate in a script.

For example:

from os import environ, path
from itertools import izip

from pocketsphinx import *
from sphinxbase import *

MODELDIR = "../../../model"
DATADIR = "../../../test/data"

# Create a decoder with certain model
config = Decoder.default_config()
config.set_string('-hmm', path.join(MODELDIR, 'hmm/en_US/hub4wsj_sc_8k'))
config.set_string('-lm', path.join(MODELDIR, 'lm/en_US/hub4.5000.DMP'))
config.set_string('-dict', path.join(MODELDIR, 'lm/en_US/hub4.5000.dic'))
decoder = Decoder(config)

# Decode static file.
decoder.decode_raw(open(path.join(DATADIR, 'goforward.raw'), 'rb'))

# Retrieve hypothesis.
hypothesis = decoder.hyp()
print 'Best hypothesis: ', hypothesis.best_score, hypothesis.hypstr

print 'Best hypothesis segments: ', [seg.word for seg in decoder.seg()]

# Access N best decodings.
print 'Best 10 hypothesis: '
for best, i in izip(decoder.nbest(), range(10)):
    print best.hyp().best_score, best.hyp().hypstr

# Decode streaming data.
decoder = Decoder(config)
decoder.start_utt('goforward')
stream = open(path.join(DATADIR, 'goforward.raw'), 'rb')
while True:
    buf = stream.read(1024)
    if buf:
        decoder.process_raw(buf, False, False)
    else:
        break
decoder.end_utt()
print 'Stream decoding result:', decoder.hyp().hypstr

UPDATE: this is not working anymore

because google closed its platform

--

you can use https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pygsr

$> pip install pygsr

example usage:

from pygsr import Pygsr
speech = Pygsr()
# duration in seconds
speech.record(3)
# select the language
phrase, complete_response = speech.speech_to_text('en_US')

print phrase