# cmusphinx/pocketsphinx

A small speech recognizer

Repository: https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/pocketsphinx
Language: C
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Topics: speech-recognition, python, c
Last push: 2026-08-26T16:03:14+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 84/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 55, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4531, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 88, "gap_med": 255.5, "n_releases_24m": 3}
- flags: no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4335, forks 732 (observed 2026-08-28T04:08:46.018411+00:00)

## What it is
PocketSphinx is Carnegie Mellon's lightweight, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition engine, available as a C library, a command-line tool, and a Python module. It uses older but compact and efficient algorithms, making it well suited to resource-constrained and offline applications.

## Use cases
- transcribe speech from wav files offline
- add speech recognition to a raspberry pi project
- embed a small speech recognizer in a C application
- recognize speech in python without cloud services
- run keyword spotting on an embedded device
- convert spoken audio to text locally

## When to choose
- you need fully offline, low-resource speech recognition
- you're targeting embedded or low-power hardware like Raspberry Pi
- you want a simple C API or Python bindings without heavy dependencies
- accuracy requirements are modest and compactness matters more than state-of-the-art results

## When to avoid
- you need state-of-the-art accuracy on noisy or diverse audio
- you want modern neural models or multilingual support out of the box
- you need streaming recognition with robust audio capture built in (the audio library was removed)
- you're building a production voice assistant where Whisper-class models are feasible

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: active
- function: speech-recognition, cli, nlp
- domain: speech-processing, embedded-systems
- platform: windows, python, c, cli, embedded
- tags: offline-speech-recognition, asr, cmu-sphinx, lightweight, embedded-speech, natural-language-processing, linux

## Member repositories
- cmusphinx/pocketsphinx (main) score 84

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:46.018411+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:21:38.604081+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx (fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:46.018411+00:00, sha f8ae98bbeee6)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.