POCKETSPHINX_BATCH(1)

🎀 POCKETSPHINX_BATCH — bestie edition

ok so this is pocketsphinx_batch(1), a General Commands Manual page, and it's literally the batch-mode girlie of the speech recognition world. no cap. let's get into it 💅

---

✨ NAME ✨

pocketsphinx_batch — run speech recognition in batch mode. that's it, that's the whole vibe 🦋

---

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pocketsphinx_batch -ctl ctlfile -cepdir cepdir -cepext .mfc [ options ]...

---

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so the whole point: you run speech recognition over a list of utterances, in batchmode. not one at a time, we're doing them all. main character energy fr fr 👑

a list of arguments follows — and it is LONG, bestie, so hydrate 💖

• -adchdr — size of audio file header in bytes (headers are ignored, we simply do not care about them)
• -adcin — input is raw audio data
• -agc — automatic gain control for c0. your options are 'max', 'emax', 'noise', or 'none'
• -agcthresh — initial threshold for automatic gain control
• -allphone — phoneme decoding with phonetic lm
• -allphone_ci — perform phoneme decoding with phonetic lm and context-independent units only
• -alpha — preemphasis parameter
• -argfile — file giving extra arguments.
• -ascale — inverse of acoustic model scale for confidence score calculation
• -aw — inverse weight applied to acoustic scores.
• -backtrace — print results and backtraces to log file.
• -beam — beam width applied to every frame in Viterbi search (smaller values mean wider beam — yes, it's backwards, we don't make the rules 😭)
• -bestpath — run bestpath (Dijkstra) search over word lattice (3rd pass)
• -bestpathlw — language model probability weight for bestpath search
• -build_outdirs — create missing subdirectories in output directory
• -cepdir — files directory (prefixed to filespecs in control file)
• -cepext — input files extension (suffixed to filespecs in control file)
• -ceplen — number of components in the input feature vector
• -cmn — cepstral mean normalization scheme. one of 'current', 'prior', or 'none'
• -cmninit — initial values (comma-separated) for cepstral mean when 'prior' is used
• -compallsen — compute all senone scores in every frame (can be faster when there are many senones, no fr)
• -ctl — file listing utterances to be processed
• -ctlcount — no. of utterances to be processed (after skipping -ctloffset entries)
• -ctlincr — do every Nth line in the control file
• -ctloffset — no. of utterances at the beginning of -ctl file to be skipped
• -ctm — output in CTM file format (may require post-sorting)
• -debug — level for debugging messages
• -dict — pronunciation dictionary (lexicon) input file
• -dictcase — dictionary is case sensitive (NOTE: case insensitivity applies to ASCII characters only — read that again, bestie)
• -dither — add 1/2-bit noise
• -doublebw — use double bandwidth filters (same center freq)
• -ds — frame GMM computation downsampling ratio
• -fdict — word pronunciation dictionary input file
• -feat — feature stream type, depends on the acoustic model
• -featparams — containing feature extraction parameters.
• -fillprob — filler word transition probability
• -frate — frame rate
• -fsg — format finite state grammar file
• -fsgctl — file listing FSG file to use for each utterance
• -fsgdir — directory for FSG files
• -fsgext — extension for FSG files (including leading dot)
• -fsgusealtpron — add alternate pronunciations to FSG
• -fsgusefiller — insert filler words at each state.
• -fwdflat — run forward flat-lexicon search over word lattice (2nd pass)
• -fwdflatbeam — beam width applied to every frame in second-pass flat search
• -fwdflatefwid — minimum number of end frames for a word to be searched in fwdflat search
• -fwdflatlw — language model probability weight for flat lexicon (2nd pass) decoding
• -fwdflatsfwin — window of frames in lattice to search for successor words in fwdflat search
• -fwdflatwbeam — beam width applied to word exits in second-pass flat search
• -fwdtree — run forward lexicon-tree search (1st pass)
• -hmm — containing acoustic model files.
• -hyp — output file name
• -hypseg — output with segmentation file name
• -input_endian — endianness of input data, big or little, ignored if NIST or MS Wav
• -jsgf — grammar file
• -keyphrase — to spot
• -kws — file with keyphrases to spot, one per line
• -kws_delay — delay to wait for best detection score
• -kws_plp — phone loop probability for keyword spotting
• -kws_threshold — threshold for p(hyp)/p(alternatives) ratio
• -latsize — initial backpointer table size
• -lda — containing transformation matrix to be applied to features (single-stream features only)
• -ldadim — dimensionality of output of feature transformation (0 to use entire matrix)
• -lifter — length of sin-curve for liftering, or 0 for no liftering.
• -lm — trigram language model input file
• -lmctl — a set of language model
• -lmname — language model in -lmctl to use by default
• -lmnamectl — file listing LM name to use for each utterance
• -logbase — base in which all log-likelihoods calculated
• -logfn — to write log messages in
• -logspec — write out logspectral files instead of cepstra
• -lowerf — lower edge of filters
• -lpbeam — beam width applied to last phone in words
• -lponlybeam — beam width applied to last phone in single-phone words
• -lw — language model probability weight
• -maxhmmpf — maximum number of active HMMs to maintain at each frame (or -1 for no pruning)
• -maxwpf — maximum number of distinct word exits at each frame (or -1 for no pruning)
• -mdef — definition input file
• -mean — gaussian means input file
• -mfclogdir — to log feature files to
• -min_endfr — nodes ignored in lattice construction if they persist for fewer than N frames
• -mixw — mixture weights input file (uncompressed)
• -mixwfloor — senone mixture weights floor (applied to data from -mixw file)
• -mllr — transformation to apply to means and variances
• -mllrctl — file listing MLLR transforms to use for each utterance
• -mllrdir — directory for MLLR transforms
• -mllrext — extension for MLLR transforms (including leading dot)
• -mmap — use memory-mapped I/O (if possible) for model files
• -nbest — number of N-best hypotheses to write to -nbestdir (0 for no N-best)
• -nbestdir — for writing N-best hypothesis lists
• -nbestext — extension for N-best hypothesis list files
• -ncep — number of cep coefficients
• -nfft — size of FFT
• -nfilt — number of filter banks
• -nwpen — new word transition penalty
• -outlatbeam — minimum posterior probability for output lattice nodes
• -outlatdir — for dumping word lattices
• -outlatext — filename extension for dumping word lattices
• -outlatfmt — format for dumping word lattices (s3 or htk)
• -pbeam — beam width applied to phone transitions
• -pip — phone insertion penalty
• -pl_beam — beam width applied to phone loop search for lookahead
• -pl_pbeam — beam width applied to phone loop transitions for lookahead
• -pl_pip — phone insertion penalty for phone loop
• -pl_weight — weight for phoneme lookahead penalties
• -pl_window — phoneme lookahead window size, in frames
• -rawlogdir — to log raw audio files to
• -remove_dc — remove DC offset from each frame
• -remove_noise — remove noise with spectral subtraction in mel-energies
• -round_filters — round mel filter frequencies to DFT points
• -samprate — sampling rate
• -seed — seed for random number generator; if less than zero, pick our own
• -sendump — dump (compressed mixture weights) input file
• -senin — input is senone score dump files
• -senlogdir — to log senone score files to
• -senmgau — to codebook mapping input file (usually not needed)
• -silprob — silence word transition probability
• -smoothspec — write out cepstral-smoothed logspectral files
• -svspec — specification (e.g., 24,0-11/25,12-23/26-38 or 0-12/13-25/26-38)
• -tmat — state transition matrix input file
• -tmatfloor — HMM state transition probability floor (applied to -tmat file)
• -topn — maximum number of top Gaussians to use in scoring.
• -topn_beam — beam width used to determine top-N Gaussians (or a list, per-feature)
• -toprule — rule for JSGF (first public rule is default)
• -transform — which type of transform to use to calculate cepstra (legacy, dct, or htk)
• -unit_area — normalize mel filters to unit area
• -upperf — upper edge of filters
• -uw — unigram weight
• -var — gaussian variances input file
• -varfloor — mixture gaussian variance floor (applied to data from -var file)
• -varnorm — variance normalize each utterance (only if CMN == current)
• -verbose — show input filenames
• -warp_params — defining the warping function
• -warp_type — warping function type (or shape)
• -wbeam — beam width applied to word exits
• -wip — word insertion penalty
• -wlen — Hamming window length

---

🌸 how to actually do the thing

to do batchmode recognition, you will need to specify a control file, using -ctl. this is a simple text file containing one entry per line. each entry is the name of an input file relative to the -cepdir directory, and without the filename extension (which is given in the -cepext argument). yes queen, the extension lives somewhere else, don't @ me 🫶

if you are using acoustic feature files as input (see sphinx_fe(1) for information on how to generate these — go read it, bestie), you can also specify a subpart of a file, using the following format:

FILENAME START-FRAME END-FRAME UTTERANCE-ID

---

✨ AUTHOR ✨

written by numerous people at CMU from 1994 onwards. this manual page by David Huggins-Daines <dhdaines@gmail.com> 💖

---

✨ COPYRIGHT ✨

copyright © 1994-2016 Carnegie Mellon University. see the file LICENSE included with this package for more information.

---

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

pocketsphinx(1), sphinx_fe(1).

---

ok that's the whole page bestie, you ate that 🍓✨

sign-off corner: this page is POCKETSPHINX_BATCH(1) from the General Commands Manual, source/version dated 2007-08-27. go forth and decode, icon 💅🌈