CMU Sphinx Open Sourced

Mandrake wrote in: "CMU Sphinx (the speech recognition software being developed at CMU being funded by DARPA and NSF for the last 15 years) has gone open source and is up for download on SourceForge. You can check out the announcement, go to the home page at CMU, or download the code for yourself. It should build out-of-box on several platforms, linux, freebsd, sun4m, etc. - but work is still needed. Help with documentation would be greatly appreciated, too. It's important that people grab this stuff ASAP, too, just in case some people decide to go after it for potential patent violations (we all know how much people love the patent system)."

Comments

Legalities v. Moralities.

[Signal 11]

It angers me that Slashdot posts suggestions to "grab it while you can", in reference to patent violations. If a patent is truly violated, I would hope that any developers out there would honor that patent and discontinue their [potentially illegal] use of the code.

This may have something to do with the credo many geeks subscribe to: That information should be free. Patents were originally invented to support truly innovative work where the author invested considerable time and energy into it. It was intended to make technology publically available so others could view and make improvements on the original idea. The tradeoff for a patent is that the public gets to view the work - and it is protected against other commercial enterprises using the patented invention for a period of n years, allowing the developer to recouperate the cost.

This was the original intention, however in recent years the purpose of patents has been mutated and mulilated: they are now often used offensively in court battles to keep competing products from entering the marketplace, they are filed in the thousands each month, many for trival innovations - witness Amazon's "one-click" patent. Such things are obvious and trivial. The USPO should have rejected it out of hand, but due to a lack of expertise in the computing arena they are patenting everything and it is having massive legal repercussions. The net result is that companies with large amounts of resources can afford drawn-out legal battles or do massive cross-patenting to keep their legal butts covered. Individuals, however, cannot do this. We have no money, and thus are of no interest to the patent holder(s).

This is why many people on slashdot are openly hostile towards patents and intellectual property - it is a matter of moral belief and civil disobedience that people copy the DeCSS code, or this code, and freely redistribute it. Many of us would have a higher respect if the system worked as designed and afforded individuals the same rights as corporations.

So yes, it is infuriating: but is is for both sides because of a fundamental breakdown in the system.

Training and Patents

[xyzzy]

Two notes --

It's unclear what training data, if any, is included with Sphinx-2. You need two types of training to run a speech recognizer: acoustic training, which tells the system the properties of the microphone, room, and language and/or dialect of speaker, and language model training, which tells the system what words are likely to be recognized.

I've posted a question on SourceForge about what sort of data comes with this system, but without either data or the ability to re-train the system, the usefulness of the recognizer will be curtailed. If CMU has suppplied English microphone-bandwidth acoustics, forget about german over-the-phone recognition.

As to patents, well, I wouldn't worry too much about that. The speech community has been openly publishing most of its results throught the DARPA programs for years. The body of prior art here is pretty high, and anyone claiming a patent would have an uphill battle. Also, Sphinx-2 is NOT CMU's latest and greatest, so that would work in favor of the open-source community.

Re:Training and Patents

[oznoid]

At this point, we only have one set of broadband, 4k state models with the release. Our next step is to get a couple of sets of generic models for broadband and for telephone speech, and make a system for tailoring the generic models to specific language models.

We will also be releasing the trainer, and Sphinx 3, but it's coming out in steps. Sphinx 2 is the real-time engine, and while Sphinx 3 is more accurate, it's still slower.

As far as releasing Data, we will be releasing whatever we can. It's OK for us to release models derived from data from, for instance, the LDC (linguistic data consortium), because their licensing terms explicitly allow it, but much of our data comes from other sources. We'll be able to put some data out, but i think we'd be better off creating a public repository of contributed data, explicitly stating that all contributed data will remain free.

Wow! Another NeXT developed technology survives!

[bbum]

Sphinx was originally built on a combination of NeXT systems [for the DSP] with large scale analysis performed on a vast array of random Unix/Andrew workstations.

I was the NeXT Campus Consultant at the time and, as such, had Sphinx [and numerous other cool projects] on my computer. Very cool stuff!

When NeXT "officially" opened their Pittsburgh office [the office had been unoficially for quite some time], I demoed Sphinx to a bunch of Pittsburgh area business leaders and all the top management at NeXT-- including Steve Jobs [Amusing anecdote in that; but not one I'd feel comfortable sharing in this public of a forum].

It was cool stuff-- worked great.

It was also amusing being at CMU when they were building the original recognition libraries. Every week the school newspaper had an add for "seeking speakers for training of the Sphinx project"-- but every week they would put the call out for english speakers AND english-as-second-language-speakers with very specific first languages.

Cool stuff! Good to see that it has survived.

Put simply...

[TheDullBlade]

Software patents are wrong. Algorithms are math and math is not patentable. Any software patent granted is a failure of the patent office, and any upheld on challenge is a failure of the courts.

The incentive of software patents is not needed to encourage people to develop and release new algorithms, but rather it interferes horribly with software development (at least whenever it is used). It stifles innovation, hampers interoperability, and maintains monopolies on reading certain data formats.

Most of us aren't "pretty good about that sort of thing," we don't respect it because we think it's evil.

The closest most of the free software community comes to "respecting" software patents is trying to avoid getting sued over them.

Irking

[Foogle]

It angers me that Slashdot posts suggestions to "grab it while you can", in reference to patent violations. If a patent is truly violated, I would hope that any developers out there would honor that patent and discontinue their [potentially illegal] use of the code.

Yeah, in the case of DeCSS it is bogus and there is a cause to rally behind. I hardly see that as reason to try to screw over all software patent holders. And I think most of us are pretty good about that sort of thing, but I just felt it needed saying.

Also, I understand that it wasn't a Slashdot person who actually wrote that comment, but I still don't how hard it would be to strip out little editorial comments like that. I'd hardly call it censorship.

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Okay, reasons:

[TheDullBlade]

Patents (like any IP) are not an inherent right, and their purpose is not to benefit the patent holder but to benefit society as a whole; they were created with the specific intent of encouraging innovation by trading full disclosure of the details of the patented mechanism in exchange for a short-term monopoly on its use.

They were created (in their modern form) to prevent excessive secrecy and completely snuff out the stifling guild model of protecting trade secrets.

Mathematics and facts of the natural sciences are specifically noted as unpatentable in patent law. This is because it was recognized that there was no need for patents in these fields; people already shared their discoveries freely in hopes of the recognition and prestige they could gain by it. Patents would only interfere with this and slow progress.

Computer science is not only a branch of mathematics (algorithms are as old as the abacus, and were formalized long before the first programmable computer), but shows all the same behavior that makes it an unsuitable field for patents. People proudly explain their clever algorithms and data structures for no direct monetary gain. Allowing software patents has only interfered with the progress of the field.

Practically every software developer breaks software patent laws. There are a great many software patents on simple, obvious, and common practices, and it is generally not feasible even to check whether you are infringing on anyone else's patents. It is also not economically feasible to legally challenge every bogus patent that one wishes to use. If one were to attempt to remain in full compliance at all times with patent law, it would be hundreds or thousands of times more expensive than the actual software development.

Not only are software patents useless and harmful, they are impossible to obey or generally enforce, thus becoming merely another weapon for competition through litigation so whoever spends the most money on lawyers wins.

No Patent Issues

[oznoid]

CMU Sphinx has no patent issues. We posted it in good faith, and all the work is original, and internal. CMU has participated in the DARPA speech program since its inception, and this codebase is part of what had been used there all the while. The oldest files in the distribution contain comments from 1977.

We don't believe there are any intellectual property issues with CMU Sphinx. Any patents issues that people might raise would have to overcome the considerable prior art at CMU, and all the code is from CMU, so there are no copyright issues.

After years of public moneys going towards this project, we feel good about putting the code in a public place like sourceforge. It makes a public record of it, and we hope this will help the community to build new systems and applications, and to refine the code. We intend to release the acoustic trainer and Sphinx3 also. Sphinx2 is our real-time system (but S3 is getting there quickly).