Exploring Speech to Text

All hail lzaf.

I've written a php version of this script if anyone's interested.

Always interested. Where can we find it??

I'm still cleaning it up. Basically it's just a 'script -i test.wav -o string'

type of file. meaning, send it any audio file and flac will convert and send it to google and get the result back unjsoned...

Also it kinda requires json wrapper on PHP less than 5.3(which I'd also include)

Here it is: http://www.the159.com/googlespeech/gtr.phps

I still want it to use sox, just haven't gotten there yet.

Its just a non fatal perl warning. From the top of my head I think its the part of the code that checks for interrupt digits or some other user specified options. Its not a real problem and it doesnt mean that there is some misbehavior.
If you really want it to go away edit the script and comment out the line 'use warnings;'
The warnings are enabled by default just to help users and developers since the code is still young and problems might appear.

Good job tm. I would advice you not to bother with sox. I have already removed all sox related code from my script. Sox was used in order to see if sound normalising (and some other tricks like low/highpass filtering etc) would improve detection rates. In all my tests this didn't happen. I think googles engine is already highly optimised for this kind of input (telephone recorded voice data) and trying to edit the voice data before sending it doesn't really help.
And another note, in its current form your script accepts only raw sound data, I think it would be more practical if it could work with wav files.

Has anyone tried out lzaf's googletts script that uses google's text to speech? I am curious to know if the quality of speech is any better than flite?

There is a cli application (under the folder cli ) that you can use to get an idea of the produced speech quality without involving asterisk.
Having worked a lot with speech synthesis and developed many asterisk tts modules that work with differed engines I have to admit that google's engine gives by far the best results. The sound is very natural and as close to a natural voice as possible, plus the fact that it supports a wide variety of languages. To my ears it even beats most of the expensive commercial engines available for telephony applications.
Possible drawbacks are the facts that the terms of use are not yet clearly defined and that you have to contact a remote server to get the voice data.
I would not suggest to be used in a production environment yet, at least until google defines the exact terms of use for that service, but for home/hobbyist/hackish use i think its the best free available option.

I gave it a try on PIAF 1.7.5.6 purple but I am missing something. Googletts requirements:

Code:

------------
Requirements 
------------
Perl         The Perl Programming Language
perl-libwww  The World-Wide Web library for Perl
sox          Sound eXchange, sound processing program
mpg123       MPEG Audio Player and decoder
format_sln   Raw slinear module for asterisk

Can anyone tell me how to determine if the above are installed and how to install the missing ones? I shamefully admit my Linux skills are weak.

I have hijacked this thread, mods please feel free to split off all posts from #50 onward to another thread.

KUMARULLAL's post gets all the dependencies working and copying googlets.agi to /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/ installs the script. I did a quick side by side comparison with flite and google tts is the bomb. Lots of languages to choose from too.

Give it a try!

Nooooooooo. I'm enjoying every minute. Can't wait to try it. This is what the Developer's Corner is for!

FYI: All of the dependencies outlined above already are included in PIAF2 with the exception of perl-XML-Simple. It was added to new installs a few days ago.

Here is the download syntax to get the current release of Googletts:

Code:

w-g-e-t --no-check-certificate https://github.com/downloads/zaf/asterisk-googletts/asterisk-googletts-0.5.tar.gz

And here is an excerpt from the documentation showing dialplan usage:

The idea of passing a text file as input to an agi script has some shortcomings. Newlines, quotes and some special characters might confuse the agi script and the way it handles stdin to get its arguments. As a first step i would suggest you to strip newlines and quotes from your text (results.txt) before passing it to googletts.agi

Code:

exten => 444,1,Answer()
exten => 444,n,Wait(1)
exten => 444,n,agi(googletts.agi,"As Rick Perry would say, Ooops! Something went haywire. Please try your call again later.",en)
exten => 444,n,hangup

If this code doesn't work, then you're missing one or more of the dependencies. sox or mpg123 are likely culprits. HINT: There are no problems on default PIAF2 systems.