speech recognition - Python pocketsphinx RequestError: missing PocketSphinx module: ensure that PocketSphinx is set up correctly

Question

I am trying to make a Python app that can record audio and translate it into english text using PyAudio, SpeechRecognition and PocketSphinx. I'm running on a Mac OS X El Capitan, version 10.11.2.

Following a tutorial like this one and others, I've downloaded PyAudio version 0.2.9, SpeechRecognition as well as PocketSphinx. I've installed them into a Conda environment. I have followed the instructions from this site to use brew install swig git python on my OS X, hoping it would help.

This is my code:

# Load packages
import speech_recognition as sr
import sphinxbase
import pocketsphinx

# obtain audio from the microphone
r = sr.Recognizer()
with sr.Microphone() as source:
    print("Say something!")
    audio = r.listen(source)

# write audio to a WAV file
with open("microphone-results.wav", "wb") as f:
    f.write(audio.get_wav_data())

So far things are working great. I can record and play back my WAV file no problems. But here is where things go wrong...

r = sr.Recognizer()
with sr.AudioFile('microphone-results.wav') as source:
    audio = r.record(source) # read the entire audio file

try:
    print("You said " +  r.recognize_sphinx(audio))
except LookupError:         # speech is unintelligible
    print("Could not understand audio")

When I run this code I get: RequestError: missing PocketSphinx module: ensure that PocketSphinx is set up correctly.

I have installed PocketSphinx and Sphinxbase both globally and in virtual conda envs but to no avail. Documentation on this error on Google / SO posts is close to zero so I'm not sure what is going on. Any help/ advice would be greatly appreciated.

Here is a list of my installed packages and their versions for my conda virtual environment:

# packages in environment at /Users/nathancheever/anaconda/envs/audio_2:
#
appnope                   0.1.0                    py27_0
backports-abc             0.4                       <pip>
backports.ssl-match-hostname 3.4.0.2                   <pip>
backports_abc             0.4                      py27_0
decorator                 4.0.9                    py27_0
freetype                  2.5.5                         0
ipykernel                 4.3.1                    py27_0
ipython                   4.1.2                    py27_2
ipython-genutils          0.1.0                     <pip>
ipython_genutils          0.1.0                    py27_0
ipywidgets                4.1.1                    py27_0
jinja2                    2.8                      py27_0
jsonschema                2.4.0                    py27_0
jupyter                   1.0.0                    py27_2
jupyter-client            4.2.2                     <pip>
jupyter-console           4.1.1                     <pip>
jupyter-core              4.1.0                     <pip>
jupyter_client            4.2.2                    py27_0
jupyter_console           4.1.1                    py27_0
jupyter_core              4.1.0                    py27_0
libpng                    1.6.17                        0
markupsafe                0.23                     py27_0
mistune                   0.7.2                    py27_1
nbconvert                 4.1.0                    py27_0
nbformat                  4.0.1                    py27_0
notebook                  4.1.0                    py27_2
openssl                   1.0.2g                        0
path.py                   8.1.2                    py27_1
pexpect                   4.0.1                    py27_0
pickleshare               0.5                      py27_0
pip                       8.1.1                    py27_1
ptyprocess                0.5                      py27_0
pyaudio                   0.2.9                     <pip>
pygments                  2.1.3                    py27_0
pyqt                      4.11.4                   py27_1
python                    2.7.11                        0
pyzmq                     15.2.0                   py27_0
qt                        4.8.7                         1
qtconsole                 4.2.1                    py27_0
readline                  6.2                           2
setuptools                20.6.7                   py27_0
simplegeneric             0.8.1                    py27_0
singledispatch            3.4.0.3                  py27_0
sip                       4.16.9                   py27_0
six                       1.10.0                   py27_0
speechrecognition         3.4.2                     <pip>
sphinxbase                0.8                       <pip>
sqlite                    3.9.2                         0
ssl_match_hostname        3.4.0.2                  py27_0
terminado                 0.5                      py27_1
tk                        8.5.18                        0
tornado                   4.3                      py27_0
traitlets                 4.2.1                    py27_0
wheel                     0.29.0                   py27_0
zlib                      1.2.8                         0

Answer 1

You will need these libraries for compiling pocketsphinx:

sudo apt-get install -qq python python-dev python-pip build-essential swig libpulse-dev

After that it's simple to install pocketsphinx:

sudo pip install pocketsphinx