Apress - Smart Home Automation with Linux (2010)- P36:Linux users can now control their homes remotely! Are you a Linux user who has ever wanted to turn on the lights in your house, or open and close the curtains, while away on holiday? Want to be able to play the same music in every room, controlled from your laptop or mobile phone? Do you want to do these things without an expensive off-the-shelf kit | CHAPTER 5 COMMUNICATION The Software for Voice Recognition This part of the problem is rather poorly supported by Linux currently which is not surprising. To understand even the simplest phrases you need an acoustic model to generate representations of the sounds themselves in a statistical fashion often as part of the initial training with a specific speaker and a language model to consider the probabilities of what words and sounds are likely to follow another to limit the processing necessary when analyzing speech both of which are language-specific. Most of the native Linux software is either old and incomplete impossible to compile or commercial. Even the high-grade solutions such as Sphinx http require so many levels of installation and training that no one is really sure if it works The commercial offerings have the problem of scarcity with few to none of the supposedly available software sporting a buy here page. This absence even includes ViaVoice from IBM which was once free but withdrawn in 2002. Even older software that once existed as commercial Linux software has transformed into Windows-only packages. It is indeed a strange state of affairs when the easiest method of processing vocal commands under Linux is through Windows This can either take the approach of running a virtual machine through either Wine or VMware Server or using a native Windows machine. The virtualization approach has a few problems because of incongruities between the virtual and real sound cards but software such as ViaVoice or Dragon Naturally Speaking can often be coaxed into working after a while. If the software is to be run on your server which it usually is then you are also adding the dependency of X Windows to it increasing its processing load. Consequently the most efficient way is to employ a separate Windows machine running the previously mentioned software. Or since you ve already paid the Windows tax use the software built in to Vista and download the .
