05 January 2013

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.



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 ../


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.

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


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


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:



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*

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

7 comments:

  1. Thanx very much for describing this, i will just add:

    if you have:
    fatal error: bits/predefs.h
    while compiling HTK install:
    sudo apt-get install libc6-dev-i386

    Hi!
    ernierasta

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cheers for pointing that out.

      I've moved the dependencies to the top now -- libc6-dev is pulled in via build-essential, but for some reason I didn't list the dependencies until right before the simon install.

      Delete
  2. # ./simon
    QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
    simon(18537): KUniqueApplication: Cannot find the D-Bus session server: "Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken."

    simon(18536): KUniqueApplication: Pipe closed unexpectedly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No idea based on the supplied message. Distro? Release? Desktop?

      Delete
    2. What are $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID set to?

      Delete
  3. Excuse my English -> google translator.
    debian-7.1.0-i386-kde-CD-1 install + apt-get upgrade

    Desktop - base KDE-not working , gnome - problem working

    # uname -a
    Linux debian 3.2.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.2.46-1 i686 GNU/Linux

    About d-bus know if you meant this
    # dbus-launch --auto-syntax
    DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS='unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-COmmnjBUPr,guid=9ee28f2ce527ee1c9da2163e521a5aad';
    export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS;
    DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=5172;



    After the installations mentioned Debian I proceeded Anybody step of your manual and after running the command. / Simon I did not start an App of the above message.

    After the command "apt-get install kde-full" mi. / Simon also did not start, and after installing apt-get install gnome mi. / Simon launched but I got only the setting of the error:

    error message is on this page
    http://www.hrobar.mamhlad.cz/crash.txt

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not sure why it isn't working -- I've only ever tried under gnome. You might want to post a question on forums.debian.net

      Delete