Setting Up an Offline Transcriber Using Kaldi - Part 3: Sphinx, not Kaldi

How to install PocketSphinx 5Prealpha on Mint 17.3.

We're going to install work with these packages in a folder located at ~/tools.  Make sure this exists.

mkdir ~/tools

Download pocketsphinx and sphinxbase from the downloads page:

• Look for the package called sphinxbase-5prealpha.tar.gz.  https://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/files/sphinxbase/5prealpha/
• Look for the package called pocketsphinx-5prealpha.tar.gz.  https://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/files/pocketsphinx/5prealpha/

Move the files from your downloads to your project folder and extract them.

tar -xzf ~/Downloads/sphinxbase-5prealpha.tar.gz -C ~/tools/
tar -xzf ~/Downloads/pocketsphinx-5prealpha.tar.gz -C ~/tools/

Make sure dependencies are installed.  You're installing libpulse-dev so that sphinxbase will configure itself to work with PulseAudio, the recommended audio framework on Ubuntu (and, by extension, on Mint).

sudo apt-get install python-dev pulseaudio libpulse-dev gcc automake autoconf libtool bison swig

Note: make sure that swig is at least version 2.0.  You can check with this command:

dpkg -p swig | grep Version

Move into the sphinxbase folder.

cd ~/tools/sphinxbase-5prealpha

Since you downloaded the release version, the configure file has already been generated.  It's time to configure, make and make install!

./configure
make
sudo make install

Sphinxbase is installed in /usr/local/lib; in case Mint 17 doesn't look there for program libraries, you have to manually tell it to use that location.  Here's the commands:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

Now move into the pocketsphinx folder and do the same installation:

cd ~/tools/pocketsphinx-5prealpha
./configure
make
sudo make install

you can test the installation by running the following; it should be recognizing what you speak into the microphone.

pocketsphinx_continuous -inmic yes

If you want to transcribe a file, use this command:

pocketsphinx_continuous -infile file.wav

If you run into trouble, this should help.