Simon/Installation

Other languages:

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. Users of debian based systems should use the provided debian package and users of OpenSUSE should use the RPM packages while users of other distributions should use the general binary package.

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

OpenSUSE

To install Simon on OpenSUSE, please use the official packages on the OpenSUSE Build Service that are provided by the Simon Listens team.

Simply search for Simon on the OpenSUSE Software search and install Simon using the one click installation link for your repository.

During installation Yast will offer to add the KDE:Unstable:Playground repository to your system which you should accept. This way you also get updates for Simon when we release new versions.

After completing the installation the Simon applications will be installed on your system. To also install translation and the handbook (recommended) install the simon-doc and simon-lang packages which will show up in your package manager automatically after adding the repository in the previous step. You can of course also download them manually using the software search (link above).

For OpenSUSE 11.3 the direct links are these:

simon

simon-lang (translations)

simon-doc (manuals)

Ubuntu

For Ubuntu please use the provided ppa repository maintained by the Simon Listens team.

To add the repository to your system execute the following commands in a command line:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:simon-listens/releases
sudo apt-get update

You can find more information about this process in the ubuntu documentation.

You can then install Simon with your package manager. Simon will be updated automatically when new versions are released through the systems update process.

Manual

Download the current installation file from our Sourceforge page. Select the file matching your architecture (i386/amd64) and your system (.deb/.rpm/.sh).

Install Simon using the just loaded installation file. If installation does not automatically start, you can use the following commands in a terminal:

cd <path_to_file>

Debian based Systems: (min. Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10))

sudo dpkg -i simon-<version>-<...>.deb

RPM based Systems:

sudo rpm -i simon-<version>-<...>.rpm

Generic Systems:

./simon-<version>-<...>.sh

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