`sh run_all.sh` prepares all ASR datasets (currently, only LibriSpeech available). After running, we have several summarization manifest files in json-format.
A manifest file summarizes a speech data set, with each line containing the meta data (i.e. audio filepath, transcript text, audio duration) of each audio file within the data set, in json format. Manifest file serves as an interface informing our system of where and what to read the speech samples.
It will compute mean and stdandard deviation for audio features, and save them to a file with a default name `./mean_std.npz`. This file will be used in both training and inferencing. The default feature of audio data is power spectrum, and the mfcc feature is also supported. To train and infer based on mfcc feature, please generate this file by
Usually, the parameters $\alpha$ and $\beta$ for the CTC [prefix beam search](https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2873) decoder need to be tuned after retraining the acoustic model.
A real-time ASR demo is built for users to try out the ASR model with their own voice. Please do the following installation on the machine you'd like to run the demo's client (no need for the machine running the demo's server).
For example, on MAC OS X:
```
brew install portaudio
pip install pyaudio
pip install pynput
```
After a model and language model is prepared, we can first start the demo's server:
On the client console, press and hold the "white-space" key on the keyboard to start talking, until you finish your speech and then release the "white-space" key. The decoding results (infered transcription) will be displayed.
It could be possible to start the server and the client in two seperate machines, e.g. `demo_client.py` is usually started in a machine with a microphone hardware, while `demo_server.py` is usually started in a remote server with powerful GPUs. Please first make sure that these two machines have network access to each other, and then use `--host_ip` and `--host_port` to indicate the server machine's actual IP address (instead of the `localhost` as default) and TCP port, in both `demo_server.py` and `demo_client.py`.