I wrote Speech::Recognition::Vosk, but it certainly needs some love.

I also am looking at whisper.cpp, which should be easier to build, but I haven't put it into use. I plan a start with Inline::C, simply embedding/including the header file, and then trying to port over the stream.cpp example file into an API.

Text-to-speech seems to be a very convoluted setup in every implementation I've looked at. There is mimic-3, but I haven't found a library that doesn't have lots and lots of build prerequisites.

I found that the hardest part for voice recognition is not implementing it in your program. At least for me and my own speech patterns, most systems go as far as "i recognize that this is a voice you are using" before giving up and selecting some random action in the vague hope that this is what i asked for.

The best solution so far (at least for me) is using one of those Echo dot thingies and creating a module/app/whateveritsname on their site that RPCs my own home automation system. Google also has good voice recognition.

The problem ATM is that any locally installed version will almost always be inferior to what Amazon and Google can do, simply by throwing Petabytes of training data into their data centers to train some neural network. And then run that neural network on their custom-made neural network processor hardware.

If you don't mind Google listening in, you can try their speech-to-text models for free if i'm not mistaken. After that, it costs 2-3 cents per minute. The sad thing about this is, with current energy prices, it's probably more expensive to run an (inferior) speech recognition locally. There are client libs for a few different programming languages, shouldn't be impossible to re-implement one of those in Perl (or just control an external program)

There is also the possibility to use your browsers speech recognition (also uses the Google cloud in most cases) and sending the recocognized text to the perl webserver of your choice. BTW, browsers also have a build-in text-to-speech API.

Putting it in a website could make your application a bit more flexible, since you probably have a matching client in your pocket (=smartphone), so you can control your stuff by speech from everywhere. Basically, you outsource all the speech stuff to your browser, and do all the cool and interesting stuff in your perl backend.

• https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng
• Re: Speech Recognition with SAPI5 both examples failing in SpSharedRecoContext
• Speech::eSpeak
• old perl tk application: perlbox
• voice.exe a tiny, working wrapper around the builtin System.Speech.Synthesis (MS)
• useful example in this doc from page 151 -https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda -sapi5 xml

About Win32::SAPI5 (module code indecryptable by me: I cannot even find the Speak method :) ..just to have somewhere to record my tries:

perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -MClass::Inspector -MData::Dumper -e "print Dumper
+ \Class::Inspector->methods('Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice','expanded')"

[..]

# or 
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "for (sort keys %Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice::){print
+ qq($_\n) if exists &{qq(Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice::$_)}}"

# working
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); print for
+ $voice->GetInstalledLanguages"
Italian (Italy)English (United States of America)

# NOT working
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); print for
+ $voice->GetInstalledVoices"

# working pitch
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); $voice->S
+peak( q{ <pitch absmiddle='10'>This is a test.</pitch>})"

perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); $voice->S
+peak( q{ <pitch absmiddle='-10'>This is a test.</pitch>})"

# working absspeed from -10 .. 10 ?
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); $voice->S
+peak( q{ <rate absspeed='-10'>this is some input text</rate>})"

# working silence and spelling
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); $voice->S
+peak( q{<silencemsec='500'/> <spell>UN</spell>})"


# working fortmat date
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); $voice->S
+peak( q{  <says-as interpret-as='date'> 4/12/1972   })"


#wondering if it works :)
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); $voice->S
+peak( q{           <prompt>If I want I can <prosody rate='+150%'>spee
+d up the rate</prosody></prompt>   })"

# not working
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); $voice->S
+peak( q{           Today is <Context ID='date'>01/31/2023</Context>  
+ })"

# working but not with text in front of tags
perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); $voice->S
+peak( q{           <context ID = 'web_url'>www.perl.org</context> <co
+ntext ID = 'time'>12:30</context> })"
[download]

L*

https://metacpan.org/release/JOUKE/Win32-MSAgent-0.07/source/demo.pl

Re: SAPI just as frontend ?

Win32::OLE SAPI.SpVoice Japanese

If you save the following code as a text file and rename it to SPEAK.VBS and then call it from Perl...your Windows PC will speak! The first argument should be a number between 1 and 100. The second argument should be some English words enclosed with double quotes. (If you omit the double quotes, then it will only read the first word.)

IF Wscript.Arguments.length > 1 THEN
    SET VOICE = CreateObject("SAPI.SpVoice")
    VOICE.Volume = Wscript.Arguments(0)
    VOICE.Speak Wscript.Arguments(1)
    WScript.Quit 1
ELSE
    WScript.Echo "Usage: speak.vbs <VOLUME> <TEXT>"
END IF
WScript.Quit 0
[download]

(Note: Don't send too much text all at one time, because the computer will freeze up while it speaks. At least, that's what happens in Windows XP. So, if you have a bunch of things you want the computer to read, then call SPEAK.VBS with just a few words at a time. That way if you want to press CTRL+BREAK, you can interrupt your program, and it will stop speaking. But if you call SPEAK.VBS with a whole paragraph, it will not stop until it has finished reading the entire paragraph.)

Again, you can cut out the middle man of writing files then calling them through perl by automating using Win32::OLE, cleaner, more control etc.