Sphinx Guideline version 1

Chapter1.
Introduction
CMU Sphinx is one of the most popular speech recognition applications for Linux and it can correctly
capture words. It also gives the developers the ability to build speech systems, interact with
voice and build something unique and useful. Speech recognition in Sphinx is based on Hidden
Markov model (HMM).
An HMM-based system, like all other speech recognition systems, functions by first learning the
characteristics (or parameters) of a set of sound units, and then using what it has learned about the
units to find the most probable sequence of sound units for a given speech signal. The process of
learning about the sound units is called training. The process of using the knowledge acquired to
deduce the most probable sequence of units in a given signal is called decoding, or simply recognition.
Accordingly, you will need those components of the SPHINX system that you can use for training
and for recognition. In other words, you will need the SPHINX Trainer and a SPHINX decoder.
CMU Sphinx toolkit has a number of packages for different tasks and applications. It’s sometimes
confusing what to choose. To clean-up, here is the list:
• Sphinxbase — support library
• Sphinx3 v8 — adjustable, modifiable recognizer
• CMUclmtk — language model tools
• Sphinxtrain — acoustic model training tools
You can download CMU Sphinx Toolkit from sourceforge.
For installing Sphinx, Follow the guide:
Installation guide.
1