When I was working on CMU Sphinx, I was more an aggressive young guy and love to start many projects (still am). So I started many projects and not many of them completed. I wasn’t completely insane: what was lacking at that point of development is that we lack of passion and momentum. So working on many things give a sense of we are moving forward.
One of the projects, which I feel I should be responsible, is the Hieroglyph. It was meant to be a complete set of documentation for several Sphinx components work together. But when I finished the 3rd draft, my startup work kicked in. That’s why what you can see is only an incomplete form of the document.
Fast-forward 6 years later, it was unfortunate that the document is still the comprehensive source of sphinx if you want to understand the underlying structure/method of CMU Sphinx C-based executables. The current CMU Sphinx encompasses way more than I decided to cover. For example, the Java-based Sphinx4 has gained much followings. And pocketsphinx is pretty much the de-facto speech recognizer for embedded speech recognition.
If you were following me (unlikely but possible), I have personally changed substantially. For example, my job experience taught me that Java is a very important language and having a recognizer in Java would significantly boost the project. I also feel embedded speech recognition is probably the real future of our life.
Back to Hieroglyph, suffice to say it is not yet a sufficient document. I hope that I can go back to it and ask what I can do to make it better.
Arthur