Speech Recognition in Linux

One of the most interesting and powerful things about Linux is it's versatile set of libraries which are available for use. I was trying to find some good material on Speech recognition which is effective as well as open source. (It's known to all how bad Windows Sam is!).

I was literally overwhelmed with the kind of work being done by the open source community in this field. Many speech recognition libraries are available which work way better than ones I'd seen before.
FreeSpeech (also known as Open Mind Speech), Festival etc are very powerful libraries for speech recognition and are being developed furiously by open source group. Many of such speech recognition libraries have Fast Fourier Synthesis at thier heart. It is this mathematical wonder that packs the punch in them and makes them effective. Those who wish to get a feel of how FFT is used in Speech recognition might want to have a look at VoiceApp "a program to visualize sound waves via FFT". Nice thing to toy around with.

Though i must add that making all these libraries work requires quite an amount of proficiency to resolve tricky inter-library dependencies. Is this doesn't deter you, what are you waiting for! Get Started.

You can find more libraries here.

Do let me know if you proceed on this topic and come across some good libraries.