Categories
cmu sphinx hieroglpyh Thought

Self Criticism : Hieroglyph

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