This is a demonstration of realtime online speech recognition using the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit.
It uses WebRTC to communicate between the server and the browser. It sends audio from the user's microphone using the WebRTC audio track and sends text from the server to the browser using the WebRTC datachannel (most commonly used for sending chat messages).
The server program is written in Python. It uses aiohttp to display the web-page and serve other static data (javascript, CSS. images). For WebRTC functionality it uses the excellent aiortc library. The system requires only one Python server running, but supports multiple Kaldi instances in the background. Once it receives a request from the browser it opens a connection to the Kaldi engine and keeps forwarding audio and text between Kaldi and the user's browser.
The easiest way to use this program is with Docker, as described below. The following section explains how the program available here works.
The server loads a JSON configuration file as an argument to the program. The configuration file defines the hosts and ports of the Kaldi engines, as well as their samplerate (different models can have different sample rates).
In the future, I plan to add the option to include different types of engines (eg. for different languages) that can be picked from the website.
After loading the configuration, the server creates a queue and simply takes engines from the queue as they are requested. If the queue gets exhausted, an error 500 is returned. Simply put, you need as many engines runnning, as the number of concurrent browser sessions you intend to support.
This server relies on the connection with the online2-tcp-nnet3-decode-faster program. If you want to install it on
your own, please follow the official instructions for installing Kaldi. You can find a brief version of that in
docker/kaldi/Dockerfile.
This is the simplest way of setting up and testing this project. I have created a couple of Docker images with all the neccessary components and uploaded them to docker hub. In order to use them, you don't need to copy anything from this repository. You just need to have Docker installed and run the commands as described below.
In addition to Docker, you will need to have the docker-compose program installed. This program allows to easily start
several containers at once simply by changing the configuration in a yml file. A sample is provided in
docker/docker-compose.yml.
To run the server, simply copy the docker/docker-compose.yml and the required
docker/servers.json files into a folder of your choice and run: docker-compose up -d
First time you run it, the program will download the images from Dockerhub so it may take a little while. Once it's running,
you can run docker-compose logs -f to monitor the logs of the running servers.
At any time you can run docker-compose stop to temporarily shutdown and docker-compose start to restart the service.
Finally, you can run docker-compose down to stop and remove the containers altogether.
If you want to set up more Kaldi engines, you need to edit both the docker-compose.yml and servers.json files.
More details on the dockerfiles is provided in this document.
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