Running Python Speech Recognition in background

Implementing the listen_in_background() function

Introduction

Speech Recognition is an important feature in several applications used such as home automation, artificial intelligence, etc. This article aims to provide an implementation for the listen_in_background() function of python’s speech recognition module.

Installing SpeechRecognition

SpeechRecognition is compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.3+, but requires some additional installation steps for Python 2. For this article, I’ll assume you are using Python 3.3+.

You can install SpeechRecognition from the terminal with pip:

pip install SpeechRecognition

Down below is the Implementation

import speech_recognition as sr
from time import sleep

def callback(recognizer, audio):
    try:
        print(recognizer.recognize_google(audio)) #Output
    except sr.UnknownValueError:
        pass

recognizer = sr.Recognizer()
mic = sr.Microphone(0)

with mic as source:
    recognizer.adjust_for_ambient_noise(source)

stop_listening = recognizer.listen_in_background(mic, callback)


while True: 
    sleep(0.1)