NAME

Speech::Recognizer::ViaVoice - Perl wrappers for IBM's ViaVoice speech Recognizer library.

SYNOPSIS

use Speech::Recognizer::ViaVoice;

$| = 1;

if (0 == connectEngine) {

    if ( 0 == defineVocab('myTestVocab', ['hello','world','quit']) ) {
        print 'please say "hello", "world", or "quit" at each prompt...', "\n";

        while (0 == startListening) {
            print "speak> ";
            if (0 == recognize) {
                my ($s, $score) = (getWord, getScore);
                if (defined($s)) {
                    printf "%s, score=%d\n", $s, $score;
                    if ($s eq 'quit') {
                        exit 0;
                    }
                } else {
                    printf "not recognized!\n";
                }
            }
            stopListening;
        }
    }

    disconnectEngine;
}

DESCRIPTION

This module provides very basic use of IBM's ViaVoice library (http://www-4.ibm.com/software/speech/enterprise/te_3.html) in perl. It allows its user to pass a list of speech commands for recognition in a perl list, connect to the engine, and request recognized spoken words. The most notable feature missing from the current version is the ability to select different ViaVoice users. I plan to add this functionality shortly, but for now you must use the default user.

Consult the ViaVoice documentation for ViaVoice setup. Most will probably just need to run vvstartuserguru, which requires a java runtime environment. Results will be better if you take the time to do a little training to your own voice in this utility.

You can use this perl module for reconition of words from IBM's vocab dictionary for your chosen locale without further preparation. To recognize words not available in the dictionary or to recognize phrases, you need to create a file with phonetic spellings for use by the provided script pronunciations.pl (installed in /usr/local/bin by default). This utility reads a text file whose name is supplied as its sole argument. The file should contain lines with two fields separated by a tab character:

        Deborah --- TAB -->D EH B OW R AX
        Deborah --- TAB -->D EH B AXR R AX
        Axl Rose -- TAB -->AE K S AX L  R OW Z

The text on the left is the word or phrase to be recognized, and the text on the right is a phonetic spelling of the format specified in the ViaVoice docs (section 3 of /usr/doc/ViaVoice/bpreadme.txt in my installation). As in the example, a word or phrase might have more than one common pronunciation. You can provide all of them, one on each line.

pronunciations.pl will most likely require super user privileges to write its output to files in the ViaVoice lib directory:

        /usr/lib/ViaVoice/vocabs/langs/En_US/pools/

INSTALLATION

To install this module, first change the line in Makefile.PL that looks like the following to reflect your locale:

    'DEFINE'            => '-DLOCALE=\"En_US\"',

Then, type the following:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

Note: "make test" will prompt you to say a word and attempt to recognize it. It will fail unless you have IBM ViaVoice setup and your microphone connected and ready to go.

DEPENDENCIES

This module requires IBM's ViaVoice to run.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

AUTHOR

Richard Kilgore, rkilgore@kilgoreSolutions.com

SEE ALSO

perl.