Simon/Installation

The following pages describe how you as an end-user can install and configure Simon on your computer, so that you can control your PC via voice. Please refer to the Handbook for information about how to proceed after the installation.

Software developers please follow page Setting up A Development Environment.

Windows

Get the current version of Simon from [1]. Make sure you download the Windows version of Simon - it contains "win32" in its name and ends with ".exe".

Run the installation wizard to install Simon. If you are unsure at some point during the installation you can just keep the default values.

Optional: HTK installation

If you want to train or adapt HTK acoustic models, you also need the HTK. If you don't know what that means, you can safely skip this whole step.

Simon uses a software called Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) to generate the speechmodel. This software is free of charge, but its license prohibits its distribution with Simon.

Now please register at the HTK homepage (it's free). Shortly after you entered your account details you should receive an e-mail containing your personal HTK-password.

Download the HTK. You will be asked your username and HTK-password.

Extract HTK to the bin-subfolder of your Simon installation directory. Default path is C:\Program Files\Simon 0.3\bin. The binary files from the archive (HHEd.exe, HDMan.exe, etc.) must be stored directly in this bin-folder (e.g. C:\Program Files\Simon 0.3\bin\HDMan.exe) and NOT in a subfolder of bin.

Linux

There are several ways to install Simon on linux. If there are packages for your distribution, please install Simon through your regular package manager. Additional steps after installation from the repository are sometimes required:

Linux Mint Installation (tested on 17.1 Mate) works fine via repository, but the connection to simond refused due to missing access to database. Connection can be established if libqt4-sql-lite is installed.

sudo apt-get install  libqt4-sql-sqlite

For an installation from sourcecode please follow page Setting up A Development Environment.

Optional: HTK installation

If you want to train or adapt HTK acoustic models, you also need the HTK. If you don't know what this means, you can safely skip this step.

Simon uses a software called Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) to generate the speechmodel. This software is free of charge, but its license prohibits its distribution with Simon.

For Linux users HTK is only shipped as source code which means that you will have to compile HTK for yourself. Fortunately, this is quite easy.

Before we can install HTK, we have to install its dependencies. Please install the following packages:

ALSA Development files
X11 Development files
Buildsystem with Compiler and Linker (mostly called "build-essential" or similar)

Debian based Systems:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libx11-dev libasound2-dev

Now please register at the HTK homepage (it's free). Shortly after you entered your account details you should receive an e-mail containing your personal HTK-password.

Download the most recent HTK sourcecode (HTK-<version>.tar.gz). You will be asked your username and HTK-password.

To extract, configure, build and install the downloaded Tarball, execute the following commands in a terminal:

cd <path_to_file>
tar xvf HTK-<version>.tar.gz
cd htk/

64bit-Systems only!

Remove all appearances of -m32 in configure.ac and run autoconf to regenerate the configure-file. Then run ./configure again!

./configure
 make
 sudo make install

Mac OS X

If you want to use Simon on Mac OS X, you need to compile from source. This is only recommended for more experienced users.

For an installation from sourcecode please follow page Setting up A Development Environment.