Pocketsphinx on Mac Big Sur - Shell-Bash

Pocketsphinx is a speech recognition library developed by the The Carnegie Mellon University. It is widely used for building voice assistants, speech-to-text software, and other applications that use speech recognition.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and use Pocketsphinx on Mac Big Sur using Shell-Bash.

Prerequisites

Before getting started, ensure that you have the following installed:

• Mac Big Sur
• Xcode Command Line Tools
• Homebrew
• Git

Installation

Step 1: Install Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for macOS that allows you to easily install and manage software packages. To install Homebrew, open Terminal and type the following command:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Step 2: Install Git

To install Git, run the following command in Terminal:

brew install git

Step 3: Clone Pocketsphinx Repository

Next, clone the Pocketsphinx repository by running the following command in Terminal:

git clone https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx.git

Step 4: Install Dependencies

To install the dependencies required by Pocketsphinx, run the following command in Terminal:

brew install automake libtool pkg-config sphinxbase --HEAD

Step 5: Build and Install Pocketsphinx

To build and install Pocketsphinx, navigate to the pocketsphinx directory and run the following commands in Terminal:

./autogen.sh
make
make install

Testing Pocketsphinx

To test that Pocketsphinx is working, navigate to the pocketsphinx directory and run the following command:

pocketsphinx_continuous -inmic yes

This will launch the Pocketsphinx continuous listening mode. You can start speaking and Pocketsphinx will transcribe your words.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we showed you how to install and use Pocketsphinx on Mac Big Sur using Shell-Bash. Now that you have Pocketsphinx installed, you can start building your own speech recognition applications.