Executive Summary: Alas, poor SphinxBase!
Yes, it’s that time of week again, time for another release candidate. You can also download it from PyPI.
In the spirit of total elimination, the major change here is the
disappearance of the <sphinxbase/*.h> headers. Some of them have
been relocated, so if you include <pocketsphinx.h> you can still do
useful things like load and save language models and parse JSGF. Oh,
and also do speech recognition, maybe.
There are a number of other things you can’t do, because the “utility”
headers were mostly unsuitable for public consumption. Really they
were a bit embarrassing, at least in 2022. A major rationale for
removing SphinxBase from circulation is that it just isn’t a good
foundation for you to build “applications” or anything else really.
Like, there are at least a dozen better implementations of pretty much
everything in there, and you should really use them. Command-line
parsing, for instance, should not be done with <cmd_ln.h>, so it
has been hidden from you to discourage you from trying that.
Which brings us to the other major breaking change here. Configuration is not done by parsing (possibly imaginary) command lines anymore. You can simply create a configuration and set values in it, e.g.:
ps_config_t *config = ps_config_init(NULL);
ps_config_set_str(config, "hmm", "/path/to/model");
ps_config_set_int(config, "samprate", 11025);
You can also parse JSON, or even a sort of degenerate “JSON”:
ps_config_t *config = ps_config_parse_json(
NULL, "{\"hmm\": \"/path/to/model\"}");
ps_config_t *config = ps_config_parse_json(
NULL, "hmm: /path/to/model, samprate: 11025");
The configuration can be serialized to (actual) JSON as well:
const char *jconf = ps_config_serialize_json(config);
Creating a ps_config_t sets all of the default values, but does not
set the default model, so you still need to use
ps_default_search_args() for that. Also note that
ps_expand_model_config() no longer creates magical underscore
versions of the config parameters (e.g. "_hmm", "_dict", etc) but
simply overwrites the existing values.
Python code is entirely unaffected by these changes (though it has also acquired the JSON functions mentioned above), so you should maybe use Python instead of hurting yourself with the C API.
Pull requests and bug reports and such are welcome via https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx.