PocketSphinx 5.0.4 is now released. This is a patch release which primarily adds support for Python 3.13.

Download source from GitHub or PyPI Yes, these are not exactly the same file.

Install binaries for Python:

pip3 install pocketsphinx

Read the API documentation for C and for Python3

Pull requests and bug reports and such are welcome via https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx.

PocketSphinx 5.0.3 is now released. This is a patch release which adds support for Python 3.12 and fixes a bug in the NGramModel wrapper class.

Download source from GitHub or PyPI Yes, these are not exactly the same file.

Install binaries for Python:

pip3 install pocketsphinx

Read the API documentation for C and for Python3

Pull requests and bug reports and such are welcome via https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx.

PocketSphinx 5.0.1 is now released. This is a patch release which fixes a number of bugs and documentation errors in PocketSphinx 5.0.0. See the link above for more detail.

Download source from GitHub or PyPI. Yes, these are not exactly the same file.

Install binaries for Python:

pip3 install pocketsphinx

Read the API documentation for C and for Python3

Pull requests and bug reports and such are welcome via https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx.

Well, it turns out that people were using pocketsphinx_continuous, at least sort of. As I expected, they weren’t really using the actual pocketsphinx_continuous binary for anything useful other than recognizing from files. But, well, the code did claim to be example code, and so obviously people were using it … as example code.

…which is a perfectly sensible thing to do, and unfortunately in removing the audio support from PocketSphinx, it became considerably less useful as an example of how to do recognition from a microphone, particularly if the solution of running SoX in a subprocess isn’t an appealing one (as on Windows, for instance).

The sensible solution to this is to bring back something like pocketsphinx_continuous but explicitly in the form of example code. Adding cross-platform audio support to the library is absolutely something I will not do, but there are some other options, PortAudio foremost among them. So, here is an example of using PortAudio

That said, wrangling external dependencies on Windows is very annoying. To use the above example may require a certain amount of path and environment wrangling to get CMake/VSCode/Visual Studio to find PortAudio. For this reason there is also now an example of using the Win32 Waveform Audio API directly

Note that in both cases you may have quite bad results when running a “Debug” build, because Windows is very slow, and Visual C++ outputs extremely slow code when debugging is enabled.

These examples are included in the upcoming 5.0.1 release in the examples directory.