CMU Sphinx

CMU Sphinx, also called Sphinx in short, is the general term to describe a group of speech recognition systems developed at Carnegie Mellon University. These include a series of speech recognizers (Sphinx 2 - 4) and an acoustic model trainer (SphinxTrain).

In 2000, the Sphinx group at Carnegie Mellon committed to open source several speech recognizer components, including Sphinx 2 and later Sphinx 3 (in 2001). The speech decoders come with acoustic models and sample applications. The available resources include in addition software for acoustic model training, Language model compilation and a public-domain pronunciation dictionary, cmudict.

Sphinx encompasses a number of software systems, described below.

Sphinx

Sphinx is a continuous-speech, speaker-independent recognition system making use of hidden Markov acoustic models (HMMs) and an n-gram statistical language model. It was developed by Kai-Fu Lee. Sphinx featured feasibility of continuous-speech, speaker-independent large-vocabulary recognition, the possibility of which was in dispute at the time (1986). Sphinx is of historical interest only; it has been superseded in performance by subsequent versions. An archival article describes the system in detail.