303. Compiling Simon on Debian Testing (Simon 0.4)

Here's how to get Simon 0.4.0 compiled. Simon does speech recognition which allows you do voice-control your computer. It does NOT do transcription, e.g. like Dragon Naturally Speaking.

See e.g. here, here and here for more information about Simon.

Simon uses cmake. I hate cmake since it makes life a lot more difficult than it needs to be.

Also, note that Simon relies heavily on KDE, so you need a number of KDE related files -- if not the whole desktop -- installed. Obviously, it runs fine under GNOME, which is where I'm using it.

This post is limited to describing how to compile it, not how to use it -- that may come later.

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First get the deendencies. The list of deps is taken from http://userbase.kde.org/Simon/Development_Environment#Requirements, and expanded (e.g. libboost).

sudo apt-get install qt4-qtconfig kdelibs5-dev libxtst-dev libsamplerate-dev kdepimlibs5-dev libboost-dev
sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake gettext kdeartwork libqwt-dev libqt4-sql-sqlite libphonon-dev libattica0 libattica-dev zlib1g-dev libasound2-dev 

Next sort out Julius
I think it used to be in the repos, but it's not there anymore from what I can see).

mkdir ~/tmp/simon -p
cd ~/tmp/simon
wget http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.jp/julius/56549/julius-4.2.2.tar.gz
tar xvf julius-4.2.2.tar.gz
cd julius-4.2.2/
./configure --prefix=~/.simon/julius

****************************************************************
Julius/Julian libsent library rev.4.2.2:

- Audio I/O
    primary mic device API   : alsa (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture)
    available mic device API : alsa oss
    supported audio format   : RAW and WAV only
    NetAudio support         : no
- Language Modeling
    class N-gram support     : yes
- Libraries
    file decompression by    : zlib library
- Process management
    fork on adinnet input    : no
 
  Note: compilation time flags are now stored in "libsent-config".
        If you link this library, please add output of
        "libsent-config --cflags" to CFLAGS and
        "libsent-config --libs" to LIBS.
****************************************************************

make
make install
cd ../

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HTK
You'll need HTK to use adaptive models with the Voxforge base. It's not necessary otherwise.
To get HTK, register here: http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/register.shtml

You should receive a password immediately afterwards. Then go to http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/download.shtml and download the Linux sources.Put the HTK-3.4.1.tar.gz file in ~/tmp/simon.

cd ~/tmp/simon
tar xvf HTK-3.4.1.tar.gz
cd htk/
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.simon/htk --disable-hslab
make all
mkdir ~/.simon/htk
make install

For some reason it's built as 32 bit, not 64. Also, it wants the parent install directory to exist before running make install.

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Next, sphinx:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/files/sphinxbase/0.8/sphinxbase-0.8.tar.gz
tar xvf sphinxbase-0.8.tar.gz 
cd sphinxbase-0.8/
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.simon/sphinxbase
make
make install
cd ../

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/files/pocketsphinx/0.8/pocketsphinx-0.8.tar.gz
tar xvf pocketsphinx-0.8.tar.gz
cd pocketsphinx-0.8/

./configure --prefix=$HOME/.simon/pocketsphinx SphinxBase_CFLAGS=-I$HOME/.simon/sphinxbase/include/sphinxbase SphinxBase_LIBS=-L$HOME/.simon/sphinxbase/lib
make
make install
cd ../

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/files/sphinxtrain/1.0.8/sphinxtrain-1.0.8.tar.gz
tar xvf sphinxtrain-1.0.8.tar.gz
cd sphinxtrain-1.0.8/
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.simon/sphinxtrain SphinxBase_CFLAGS=-I$HOME/.simon/sphinxbase/include/sphinxbase SphinxBase_LIBS=-L$HOME/.simon/sphinxbase/lib
make
make install

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I couldn't sort out OpenCV, so this Simon won't be watching you.

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Finally, Simon.

wget http://mirrors.mit.edu/kde/stable/simon/0.4.0/src/simon-0.4.0.tar.bz2
tar xvf simon-0.4.0.tar.bz2
mkdir build/
cd build/
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/.simon -DPOCKETSPHINX_LIBRARIES=$HOME/.simon/pocketsphinx/lib/libpocketsphinx.so -DPOCKETSPHINX_INCLUDE_DIR=$HOME/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/ -DSphinxBase_INCLUDE_DIR=$HOME/.simon/sphinxbase/include/ -DSphinxBase_LIBRARY=$HOME/.simon/sphinxbase/lib/libsphinxbase.so -DPJULIUS=$HOME/.simon/julius -DPSPHINX=$HOME/.simon/sphinxbase ../simon-0.4.0/

at which points you should see:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- The following external packages were located on your system.
-- This installation will have the extra features provided by these packages.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   * LibSampleRate - Resampling library
   * KDE PIM Libs - KDE Libraries for PIM
   * Sphinxbase - Open source toolkit for speech recognition
   * PocketSphinx - PocketSphinx is a small-footprint continuous speech recognition system

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- The following OPTIONAL packages could NOT be located on your system.
-- Consider installing them to enable more features from this software.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   * qaccessibilityclient  
     KDE client-side accessibility library
     Required to enable ATSPI plugin.
   * OpenCV  
     OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) is a library of programming functions for real time computer vision
     Required for Simon Vision

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

And now a bit of a hackjob -- we give the sphinx include dirs above, and while it works fine for most include files (they use e.g. sphinxbase/includeme.h), a number of files (prim_type, sphnx_config.h etc.) point towards the wrong directory (e.g. #include ). Two solutions -- either edit the files or put symmlinks where the files are looking. Symmlinks work well for me.

ln -s ~/.simon/sphinxbase/include/sphinxbase/sphinx_config.h ~/.simon/sphinxbase/include/sphinx_config.h
ln -s ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/pocketsphinx/pocketsphinx_export.h ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/pocketsphinx_export.h
ln -s ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/pocketsphinx/cmdln_macro.h ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/cmdln_macro.h
ln -s ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/pocketsphinx/ps_lattice.h ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/ps_lattice.h
ln -s ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/pocketsphinx/ps_mllr.h ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/ps_mllr.h
ln -s ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/pocketsphinx/fsg_set.h ~/.simon/pocketsphinx/include/fsg_set.h

make

make install

cd ~/.simon/bin

export PATH=$PATH:/$HOME/.simon/julius/bin:$HOME/.simon/sphinxtrain/bin:$HOME/.simon/htk/bin:$HOME/.simon/bin

simond &

simon

I haven't really explored it yet, but here are the first few dialogues:

There's an official video which you may want to watch before you get started:

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Issues:
Stuff that doesn't work: Configure Audio from within simon, Configure Acoustic Model from within Simon
Stuff that does work: speech recognition.

Note:
If you set it up 'wrong' the first time around (or it crashed coding samples as above)) and want the wizard to run again, delete all the configuration files:

rm ~/.kde/share/apps/simon* -rf
rm ~/.kde/share/config/simon*

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Links to this post:
http://www.forum-raspberrypi.de/Thread-speech-to-text?pid=13465