Need text to speech and speech recognition tools for Linux

Question

I\'m planning on writing a program for Linux that uses text to speech and speech recognition. What are the best tools/libraries for this? Should I use Windows instead to be

Answer 1

http://simon-listens.org/ - simon open-source speech / voice recognition program

Answer 2

The original question was about finding suitable libraries, I know, but from as far as using speech recognition good enough for real dictation, there seems to be nothing out there for Linux (though I am sure it will change in time, I suspect it will take a while,as I am not sure that many people are interested).

At the moment I am trying to promote Dragon NaturallySpeaking as a supported product by CodeWeavers ... so if you are interested as a user it would help if you would cast a vote ...

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=8427

Answer 3

at&t fsm toolkit is also pretty awesome - no commercial use allowed though,

http://www.research.att.com/~fsmtools/fsm/

Answer 4

I have used both Loquendo and Festival under linux. I would consider the festival voices I have used pretty poor, with very robotic synthesis. The Loquendo voices, on the other hand, are excellent - very high quality.

Answer 5

And then there is mbrola for text to speech.

Answer 6

It depends quite a bit on what speech you are trying to recognize.

This is an article from 2005 that explains some of the difficulties in creating a dictation program: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~archan/personal/whyNoOpenSourceDictationDraft4.html . If you want that, the Julius speech recognition engine seems promising, but you will need to add your own acoustic and language models. You might be able to use the voxforge acoustic model.

If you are not trying to write a dictation program then you have a much easier task. Command programs have limited vocabularies, for example 'If you would like to continue in English, say "English"'.

I was able to get pretty good results using pocketsphinx and gstreamer to make a program that automatically edits most occurrences of the word "twitter" out of the TWiT podcast. It didn't work at all until I used my own language model based on transcripts of the podcast; the machine transcriptions from the speech recognizer are useless/hilarious but they do an okay job of finding the keyword.