Category:Installation

Installation related topics

Installing Simon Voice Recognition Software

Years of using the mouse and keyboard can do a real number on your hands and wrists. To top that off heavy mouse and keyboard use can cause repetitive stress syndrome and or carpal tunnel syndrome.

Having said that if you have repetitive stress syndrome or carpal tunnel Simon is just the right software to put the keyboard and mouse use to bed.

If you'd like to install Simon on Fedora or Linux Mint it's in the repositories. For Fedora just run dnf install simon.

In Linux Mint just pull up your Software Center or Synaptic Package Manager Simon is in there.

Slackware on the other hand is a little more challenging to work with. If you are already running Linux you enjoy a good challenge anyway. I didn't know about the script that you can run to install all of the dependencies. This link discusses the sqg-sbopkg. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/sqg-sbopkg-queuefile-generator-4175451646/

The script is on this page in this link. https://code.google.com/p/sbopkg/source/browse/trunk/src/usr/doc/contrib/sqg

Here are the dependencies that need to be installed before installing Simon.

1. KDE Pim Libs . Enables the optional command plugin "Akonadi" that allows Simon to trigger commands at certain times and to use Simon dialogs as calendar reminders. 2. LibSampleRate (http://www.mega-nerd.com/SRC/). If you build Simon with LibSampleRate support, it can automatically resample audio in- and output for devices that don't support the required configuration. 3. qaccessibilityclient (http://cmusphinx.sf.net://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/accessibility/libkdeaccessibilityclient). Enables the experimental ATSPI integration. 4. Sphinxbase, PocketSphinx, SphinxTrain (http://cmusphinx.sf.net). Together, they enable SPHINX support in Simon (model compilation and recognition). 5. OpenCV (http://opencv.org). Enables the face detection and lip detection context plugins. 6.qwt

Opencv and qwt is available for download in the SlackBuilds repository. http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.1/libraries/opencv/?search=opencv

Quacessibilityclient, sphinxbase, pocketsphinx, sphinxtrain, libsamplerate and deplibsndfile are have the same instruction for installing. ./configure make and make install

Opencv is a little tricky and it depends on Eigen so install Eigen first. Also when you install opencv make sure that both the tar.gz (opencv-3.0.0.tar.gz) and the zip (opencv-contrib-3.0.0.zip) are in the same directory with the opencv.SlackBuild script.Download one at a time from these 2 websites.

https://github.com/Itseez/opencv/archive/3.0.0.tar.gz \ https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_contrib/archive/3.0.0.zip

The opencv-contrib took about 35 minutes to build in the terminal.

Ater installing all of the dependencies I rebooted, installed all of the KDE packages and than installed the final simon.txz slack package.

Now if you don't have KDE installed just run:

1. slackpkg install KDE.

Once the dependencies are installed the last pkg you want to install is: “Simon-0.3.0-x86_64-1_slack.txz” from this website: http://pkgs.org/slackware-14.1/slackonly-x86_64/simon-0.3.0-x86_64-1_slack.txz.html

The Simon Handbook list's websites that you can go to in order to download the packages and dictionaries that you will need.

Good luck with Simon.