Welcome to OpenEars iPhone voice recognition API!

From:   Download Politepix’s OpenEars

OpenEars is an shared-source iOS framework for iPhone voice recognition and TTS. It lets you implement round-trip English language speech recognition and text-to-speech on the iPhone and iPad and uses the open source CMU Pocketsphinx, CMU Flite, and CMUCLMTK libraries. Highly-accurate large-vocabulary recognition (that is, trying to recognize any word the user speaks out of many thousands of known words) is not yet a reality for local in-app processing on the iPhone given the hardware limitations of the platform; even Siri does its large-vocabulary recognition on the server side. However, Pocketsphinx (the open source voice recognition engine that OpenEars uses) is capable of local recognition on the iPhone of vocabularies with hundreds of words depending on the environment and other factors, and performs very well with command-and-control language models. The best part is that it uses no network connectivity — all processing occurs locally on the device.

Table of Contents:

The current version of the OpenEars iPhone speech recognition API is 1.1.

OpenEars can:

In addition to its various new features and faster recognition/text-to-speech responsiveness, OpenEars now has improved recognition accuracy.

Before using OpenEars, please note that its low-latency Audio Unit driver is not compatible with the Simulator, so it has a fallback Audio Queue driver for the Simulator provided as a convenience so you can debug recognition logic. This means is that recognition is better on the device, and that I’d appreciate it if bug reports are limited to issues which affect the device.

To use OpenEars:

1. Download the distribution and unpack it.

2. Create your own app, and add the iOS frameworks AudioToolbox and AVFoundation to it.

3. Inside your downloaded distribution there is a folder called “frameworks” that is inside the folder called “OpenEars”. Drag the “frameworks” folder into your app project in Xcode.

OK, now that you’ve finished laying the groundwork, you have to…wait, that’s everything. You’re ready to start using OpenEars.

Before shipping your app, you will want to remove unused voices from it so that the app size won’t be too big, as explained here.

If the steps on this page didn’t work for you, you can get free support at the forums, read the FAQ, or open a private email support incident at the Politepix shop. Otherwise, carry on to the next part: using OpenEars in your app.

OpenEars uses the open source speech recognition engine Pocketsphinx from Carnegie Mellon University: