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Me and CMU Sphinx

As I update this blog more frequently, I noticed more and more people are directed to here.   Naturally,  there are many questions about some work in my past.   For example, “Are you still answering questions in CMUSphinx forum?”  and generally requests to have certain tutorial.  So I guess it is time to clarify my current position and what I plan to do in future.

Yes, I am planning to work on Sphinx again but no, I probably don’t hope to be a maintainer-at-large any more.   Nick proves himself to be the most awesome maintainer in our history.   Through his stewardship, Sphinx prospered in the last couple of years.  That’s what I hope and that’s what we all hope.    
So for that reason, you probably won’t see me much in the forum, answering questions.  Rather I will spend most of my time to implement, to experiment and to get some work done. 
There are many things ought to be done in Sphinx.  Here are my top 5 list:
  1. Sphinx 4 maintenance and refactoring
  2. PocketSphinx’s maintenance
  3. An HTKbook-like documentation : i.e. Hieroglyphs. 
  4. Regression tests on all tools in SphinxTrain.
  5. In general, modernization of Sphinx software, such as using WFST-based approach.
This is not a small undertaking so I am planning to spend a lot of time to relearn the software.  Yes, you hear it right.  Learning the software.  In general, I found myself very ignorant in a lot of software details of Sphinx at 2012.   There are many changes.  The parts I really catch up are probably sphinxbase, sphinx3 and SphinxTrain.   One PocketSphinx and Sphinx4, I need to learn a lot. 
That is why in this blog, you will see a lot of posts about my status of learning a certain speech recognition software.   Some could be minute details.   I share them because people can figure out a lot by going through my status.   From time to time, I will also pull these posts together and form a tutorial post. 
Before I leave, let me digress and talk about this blog a little bit: other than posts on speech recognition, I will also post a lot of things about programming, languages and other technology-related stuffs.  Part of it is that I am interested in many things.  The other part is I feel working on speech recognition actually requires one to understand a lot of programming and languages.   This might also attract a wider audience in future. 
In any case,  I hope I can keep on.  And hope you enjoy my articles!
Arthur
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The Grand Janitor’s Blog

For the last year or so, I have been intermittently playing with several components of CMU Sphinx.  It is an intermittent effort because I am wearing several hats in Voci.

I find myself go back to Sphinx more and more often.   Being more experienced, I start to approach the project again carefully: tracing code, taking nodes and understanding what has been going on.  It was humbling experience – speech recognition has changed, Sphinx has more improvement than I can imagine. 
The life of maintaining sphinx3 (and occasionally dip into SphinxTrain) was one of the greatest experience I had in my life.   Unfortunately, not many of my friends know.  So Sphinx and I were pretty much disconnected for several years. 
So, what I plan to do is to reconnect.    One thing I have done throughout last 5 years was blogging so my first goal is to revamp this page. 
Let’s start small: I just restarted RSS feeds.   You may also see some cross links to my other two blogs, Cumulomaniac, a site on my take of life, Hong Kong affairs as well as other semi-brainy topics,  and  333 weeks, a chronicle of my thoughts on technical management as well as startup business. 
Both sites are in Chinese and I have been actively working on them and tried to update weekly. 
So why do I keep this blog then?  Obviously the reason is for speech recognition.   Though, I start to realize that doing speech recognition has much more than just writing a speech recognizer.   So from now on, I will post other topics such as natural language processing, video processing as well as many low-level programming information.   
This will mean it is a very niche blog.   Could I keep up at all?  I don’t know.   As my other blogs, I will try to write around 50 messages first and see if there is any momentum. 
Arthur