FR: Snowboy stt

[sbernhard]

Hi

Would it be possible to add snowboy stt? See jasperproject/jasper-client#550

I would love to have a offline voice detection only and it looksike snowboy is one of the best.

Best regards
Bernhard

[aaronchantrill]

Snowboy support was added in 2016 but since then nobody has picked up the ball to support it. Currently the snowboy plugin contains a precompiled binary shared object built for arm on the raspberry pi. The project needs to be updated, and someone needs to also update the documentation so the module can be applied to other platforms. I don't see the plugin listed in the documentation, probably because it simply no longer works. If you are interested in picking up support for this plugin, we would definitely appreciate the help.

What are the advantages of snowboy? What is it that makes it "one of the best?" I haven't ever used the system myself, so don't really understand their business model or what the benefits are.

That being said, have you tried pocketsphinx? It is lightweight, fast, fairly straightforward to configure and good for simple tasks like keyword detection. It is offline, open source, and what I generally use for keyword detection myself.

[TSRBerry]

I want to work on this, but it seems like it is already implemented as a stt plugin. What is the issue here?
Is it outdated and it needs to be updated or is it just about the doc for other OS?

Snowboy seems to do a really good job at recording a keyword and then detecting it, so no internet connection is required and the user trains the predownloaded model from https://snowboy.kitt.ai to recognize the new keyword. It should only consume a little amount of the cpu which makes it a great stt for rpi.

[TSRBerry]

Okay I read a bit more on snowboy and it seems like the devs are inactive and issues won't get any answers. I think we can still update the current version of it but since this version is already outdated we can't expect any updates or improvements in the future.

[aaronchantrill]

I think the issue is basically just that the plugin is undocumented. I imagine that is because it doesn't currently work, but I don't know because I've never tried it. I know there is a binary file in there that is pre-compiled for raspberry pi. It would be good to try to locate and link to the source code or official download page for this file so users can use this plugin on other platforms.

If you find that the plugin works in its current state, then just update the STT documentation to cover it. If it doesn't currently work, then it would be necessary to fix the issues before creating the documentation.

Naomi currently has a few suspiciously old STT plugins that really need to be tested and verified.