SpeechRecognition changelog

Changelog History

• v3.8.1 Changes

  December 05, 2017

  ⬆️ Lots of changes since June! Summary below. Get all of these and more with a quick pip install --upgrade SpeechRecognition.

  • 👍 Snowboy hotwords support for highly efficient, performant listening (thanks @beeedy!). This is implemented as the snowboy_configuration parameter of recognizer_instance.listen.
  • 🔧 Configurable Pocketsphinx models - you can now specify your own acoustic parameters, language model, and phoneme dictionary, using the language parameter of recognizer_instance.recognize_sphinx (thanks @frawau!).
  • audio_data_instance.get_segment(start_ms=None, end_ms=None) is a new method that can be called on any AudioData instance to get a segment of the audio starting at start_ms and ending at end_ms. This is really useful when you want to get, say, only the first five seconds of some audio.
  • The stopper function returned by listen_in_background now accepts one parameter, wait_for_stop (defaulting to True for backwards compatibility), which determines whether the function will wait for the background thread to fully shutdown before returning. One advantage is that if wait_for_stop is False, you can call the stopper function from any thread!
  • New example, demonstrating how to simultaneously listen to and recognize speech with the threaded producer/consumer pattern: threaded_workers.py.
  • 🛠 Various improvements and bugfixes:
    • Python 3 style type annotations in library documentation.
    • recognize_google_cloud now uses the v1 rather than the beta API (thanks @oort7!).
    • recognize_google_cloud now returns timestamp info when the show_all parameter is True.
    • recognize_bing won't time out as often on credential requests, due to a longer default timeout.
    • recognize_google_cloud timeouts respect recognizer_instance.operation_timeout now (thanks @reefactor!).
    • Any recognizers using FLAC audio were broken inside Linux on Docker - this is now fixed (thanks @reefactor!).
    • Various documentation and lint fixes (thanks @josh-hernandez-exe!).
    • Lots of small build system improvements.

• v3.8.0

  December 05, 2017

• v3.7.1 Changes

  June 27, 2017

  ⬆️ As usual, get it with pip install --upgrade SpeechRecognition

  • 🆕 New grammar parameter for recognizer_instance.recognize_sphinx - now, you can specify a JSGF or FSG grammar to PocketSphinx (thanks @aleneum!).
  • ⚡️ Update PyAudio to version 0.2.11 - this fixes a couple memory management issues users have been experiencing.
  • ⚡️ Update FLAC to 1.3.2 on all platforms - this will make it easier to support more audio formats in the near future.
  • 🛠 Fixes for various APIs on Python 3.6+ - small changes in urllib.request behavior made requests fail in certain situations.
  • 🛠 Fixes for Bing Speech API timing out due to some backwards incompatible changes to their API.
  • ⏪ Restore original IBM audio segmentation behaviour - previously, it would stop recognizing after the first pause. Now, it will recognize all speech in the input audio, as it did before IBM's changes.
  • 🛠 Fix links in PocketSphinx docs and library reference. Add-on language models now available from Google Drive, including the now-officially-supported Italian model.
  • 🆕 New troubleshooting entries for JACK server in README.
  • 📚 Documentation and build process updates.

• v3.7.0

  June 26, 2017

• v3.6.5 Changes

  April 13, 2017

  🛠 Quick bugfix for PortableNamedTemporaryFile:

  • 🛠 Fix file descriptor opening on Python 2.
  • ➕ Add tests for Sphinx keyword matching.

• v3.6.4 Changes

  April 13, 2017

  🛠 Bugfix release!

  • 🛠 Fix tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile on Windows, by replacing it with a PortableNamedTemporaryFile class. Previously, it didn't necessarily support the file being re-opened after originally opened.
  • 📚 Documentation/troubleshooting improvements (thanks @hassanmian!).
  • ➕ Add support for 24-bit FLAC audio files (thanks @sudevschiz!).
  • Fix phrase_time_limit being ignored for listen_in_background (thanks @dodysw!)
  • ➕ Added lots of new audio regression tests.
  • ✅ Code cleanup for tests and examples.

• v3.6.3 Changes

  March 11, 2017

  🛠 Small bugfix release:

  • 🖐 Handle case when GSR doesn't return a confidence value (thanks @jcsilva!).
  • 🚀 Config, style, and release improvements.
  • 🛠 Fix console window sometimes popping up when on Windows (thanks @Qdrew!)
  • 🚀 Switch release over to universal Wheels rather than source distribution.

• v3.6.0 Changes

  January 07, 2017

  🚀 This is more of a maintenance release, but a few features slipped in as well:

  • 👌 Support for the Google Cloud Speech API with recognizer_instance.recognize_google_cloud (thanks @Thynix!), plus documentation and examples.
  • Automatic sample rate detection in speech_recognition.Microphone - this should fully resolve all the "Invalid sample rate" issues from PyAudio.
  • ✅ Project now has automated tests and continuous integration with TravisCI. It's pretty nifty, and has already caught a few things during development!
  • Keywords example for recognizer_instance.recognize_sphinx.
  • 📚 Documentation improvements and updated advice in troubleshooting and library reference.
  • 🛠 Bugfix - Google Speech Recognition sometimes didn't return the text with the highest confidence (thanks @akabraham!).
  • 🛠 Bugfix - EOFError upon encountering malformed audio files; a proper exception message is now given.
  • ⚡️ Updated FLAC binaries for OS X.
  • 🛠 Bugfix - invalid FLAC binary path on OS X (thanks @akabraham!).
  • Code cleanup.

• v3.5.0 Changes

  November 21, 2016

  • 👌 Support for the Houndify API with recognizer_instance.recognize_houndify (thanks @tb0hdan!).
  • 👍 recognize_sphinx now supports keyword-based matching via the keywords=[("cat", 30), ("potato", 45)] parameter.
    • The second number in each pair is the sensitivity, which determines how loosely Sphinx will interpret speech to be those keywords - higher numbers mean more false positives, while lower numbers mean a lower detection rate.
    • A new example for keyword matching is now available.
  • 💥 BREAKING CHANGE: API.AI STT API IS BEING SHUT DOWN SOON. (source)
    • For now, the recognize_api function will keep working if you're on a paid API.AI plan, and we will not be removing it until the service is shut down entirely.
    • It is best to transition to another backend as soon as possible. I recommend Microsoft Bing Voice Recognition or Wit.ai for previous API.AI users.
  • phrase_time_limit option for listening functions, to limit phrase lengths to a certain number of seconds.
  • Support for operation timeouts with recognizer_instance.operation_timeout - this can be used to ensure long requests always take finite time.
  • 0️⃣ recognize_ibm now opts out of request logging by default, for improved user privacy (thanks @michellemorales!). This is a breaking change if you previously relied on request logging behaviour.
  • 🛠 Bugfix - listen() sometimes didn't terminate on finite-length streams.
  • 🛠 Bugfix - Microsoft Bing Voice Recognition changed their authentication API endpoint, so that required some small code updates (thanks @tmator!).
  • 🛠 Bugfix - 24-bit audio now works correctly on Python 2.
  • ⚡️ Update Wit.ai API version from deprecated version.
  • 📚 A bunch of documentation updates, fixes, and improvements.

• v3.4.6 Changes

  May 22, 2016

  🛠 Bugfix release.

  🔄 Changes:

  • api.ai now requires the sessionId field, so we'll just add that in (thanks @jhoelzl!).
  • 👌 Improve documentation a bit.
  • 🛠 Various other small fixes.