It is my pleasure to announce a new Politepix framework product for developers: SpeexKit 1.0.

What is Speex?

Speex is one of the best codecs for voice audio transmission available, with clear quality and excellent compression characteristics. It is a great match for mobile speech applications given the need for top-notch clarity and careful use of bandwidth. The Speex project is found here.

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What is SpeexKit?

SpeexKit is an iOS framework from Politepix that makes it easy to use every feature of Speex with your iPhone or iPad app without doing your own C or C++ implementation or having to deal with threading or queueing code. It is not the only way of using Speex on the iPhone, but it is designed to be an easy object-oriented way to implement it quickly in your app, even for the tricky stuff. You can download the SpeexKit demo framework here. You have to sign up, but downloading the demo is 100% free, just add it to your cart and check out. You will not have to provide any payment information to try it out. It is time-limited and can’t be submitted to the App Store — when you’re ready to license the framework it can be found on the Politepix shop.

What can you do with SpeexKit?

• Convert entire WAV or raw audio files into Speex files
• Convert entire Speex files into WAV files
• Convert buffers of Speex frames into buffers of raw audio samples, synchronously or asynchronously. In asychronous mode, threading and queuing (since Speex decoding is not realtime on all devices) are handled for you.
• Convert buffers of raw PCM audio samples into buffers of Speex frames, synchronously or asynchronously. In asychronous mode, threading and buffer queuing (since Speex encoding is not realtime on all devices) are handled for you.
• Wrap existing buffers of Speex frames into a written-out Speex file
• Wrap existing buffers of raw PCM audio samples into a written-out WAV file
• Use advanced Speex features such as such as Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and echo reduction

You can read much more about SpeexKit here. Thanks for checking it out!

• Ultra-fast, ultra-easy install
• All-C language modelling and 3x faster phonetic lookup fallback method for vastly faster dynamic language model generation
• Language model generation is now tuned to creating contextual models from long sentences with improved recognition accuracy
• Only runs with ios 4 and 5 since the only devices that need 3 can’t use OpenEars due to hardware shortcomings. This allows optimizations that make OpenEars faster.
• ARC/LLVM compatible
• General recognition accuracy is improved, recognition speed is much faster in release versions due to LLVM
• Uses the latest .7 versions of all of the Sphinx libraries
• Calibration takes half the time and is configurable as an OpenEarsConfig.h constant
• Silence detection period is configurable programmatically
• It should no longer be necessary to do anything special in order to use iOS media objects such as AVPlayer.
• It is possible to set OpenEars to programmatically mix with background sounds such as iPod music, although this is not a default setting.
• OpenEars no longer attempts to start Pocketsphinx on a device that has no audio input available
• OpenEars now cleans dynamic language model arrays on input for problematic whitespace
• JSGF now has better perception
• Dynamic JSGF switching has been added
• The AudioSessionManager is now only used internally, since it was the main cause of configuration difficulty for most developers. OpenEars now manages the audio session automagically. Don’t call AudioSessionManager directly any more, it’s no longer a developer-facing class of OpenEars.
• All reported bugs fixed
• OpenEars has a license change and is no longer EFF/OSI-defined OSS. It is free as in beer so we’ll start calling it shared source instead of open source. The big license changes paraphrased (please read the new license since you are agreeing to it when you use the framework): you can’t redistribute it as source, using it in something other than an app requires permission and special licensing, contribution terms are spelled out. Although this affects a miniscule number of developers that have used OpenEars so far, it’s a change, so if absolutely anyone wants to talk this over with me/ask more about it, I sincerely welcome you to get in touch via the contact page and I will answer and discuss any good-faith question.

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I really hope that you enjoy this easier, faster and more flexible 1.0 version of OpenEars!