[python-nl] Dragonfly, is SDK 5.1 good enough ?

[Christo Butcher]

On February 27 2009, Stef Mientki wrote:

> Ik heb het op 2 computers geprobeerd, allebei met een
> uitgebreide winXP versie. De een had een uitgebreide
> Office 2000? geinstalleerd en heeft daarmee automatisch
> SAPI 5.1 geinstalleerd, de andere computer heeft geen MS-
> office en daar is handmatig SAPI 5.1 bijgezet. De Python
> installaties op beide systemen zijn nagenoeg identiek.
>
> De eerste vraag is natuurlijk of SAPI 5.1 voldoende is,
> immers SAPI 5.1 staat bekend als een ASR, terwijl
> Dragonfly een WSR nodig heeft ?

Short answer: SAPI 5.1 is sufficient.  But you'll have to
install the additional speech SDK 5.1.  Read on for the
long answer.


> Heeft iemand een klein voorbeeldje om te zien, of de
> geinstallleerde sound api voldoende is ?

The dragonfly-main.py file in the examples subdirectory
within the Dragonfly distribution can be used for this. It
is a script which searches for other Python files within
its directory, and tries to load them as a voice-command
modules.  If you can run this successfully, then your
installed SR engine is okay.


> SAPI 5.1 zou erg aantrekkelijk zijn, omdat deze vrij
> verkrijgbaar is !

Actually, SAPI 5.1 is sufficient.  One of my test machines
runs Windows XP and SAPI 5.1, and I run (and use)
Dragonfly-based voice-commands on it.  But, and here is
the problem, for this to work correctly I have to install
a speech SDK which *used to be* available for free from
Microsoft.  The filename was SpeechSDK51.exe.  The
download page from Microsoft has disappeared, and I'm not
sure why.  Occasionally I see people writing that this SDK
is now part of the complete Windows SDK, or something like
that.  I haven't figured this out yet, and don't know
right now what you should do to get that speech SDK
installed.

(If you really want to try this out, I have that original
file lying around.  I could send it to anybody interested.
But in the long run, it would of course be nice to know
what Microsoft is up to.)


> De foutmeldingen op beide systemen zijn verschillend, hier
> een van beide, misschien dat het iemand iets zegt.
>
> UNKNOWN: CommandModule('notepad_foodgroups.py'): Error
> loading module: (-2147352567, 'Exception occurred.', (0,
> None, None, None, 0, -2147200948), None)

Beautiful COM trace back information.  From this error
message it is of course completely obvious what went
wrong.  Or not...  Does anybody know if it is possible to
get more exception information after a failed COM call?  I
can find all the information I want on the (local) Python
side, but have no idea what happened on the other side of
the COM connection.

This exception is raised when Dragonfly calls the
CreateRecoContext() method of the SAPI.SpSharedRecognizer
COM object.  This works under Windows Vista, and it works
on my Windows XP test machine with the speech SDK 5.1
installed.  But, as you noticed, it does not work on other
Windows XP machines (at least not on my machines without
the speech SDK).

Apparently you need to speech SDK to be able to do this,
and Dragonfly definitely needs to be able to do this.  At
least, I am not aware of any other way to use WSR (or ASR)
without calling that method to create a recognition
context.


> UNKNOWN: CommandModule('outlook_example.py'): Error
> loading module: cannot import name LiteralChoice

Sorry about that.  Stale example files.  Current version
in the repository has fixed this.


Thank you for your interest in Dragonfly.  This definitely
motivates me to continue developing it for other people,
besides myself.

Chris