HTK installation needs to be simplified
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#19 HTK installation needs to be simplified
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nobody
None
5
2010-07-25
2010-02-25
Anonymous
No
I realise that this is not exactly a simon bug in as much as HTK is separate from this project.
However, it doesn't matter how usable simon is or how many features it has if a key piece of its technology cannot be installed and used by end users.
HTK from what I can tell requires manual download from their site, registration, and manual compiling from source. None of these steps are acceptable to a standard end user (especially since compiling often fails on popular distributions).
A solution to this problem simply must be found. Furthermore, notification on the simon welcome screen that HTK is not installed and is required would also be a very good thing. I did not realise that it was either required or absent until I'd added words and failed to synchronise.
Perhaps you could simply include HTK in a package and then have users enter their username on first run? I realise that their license stinks, but seriously, a solution must be found to this - as I see it, it makes the application unusable for the target audience!
Discussion
Yes we know that the HTK is really a problem. We had similar issues with the HADIFIX BOMP which we managed to resolve by contacting the copyright holders (http://simon-listens.blogspot.com/2009/09/automatic-bomp-import.html).
We tried to negotiate better licensing terms or even an exception in the liccense. However, we never got a replay from the copyright holders even tough we tried multiple times to contact them.
The best thing we could do is to provide a front end to the HTK website but it would still require you to check your mail account manually so it really wouldn't be more usable.
I know what you mean with the HTK installation warning and I thought about that but it is a bit more dificult than that. Only the simond uses the HTK. As simon and simond might be on different computers (network) it doesn't always matter if the HTK is installed on the client (simon). We could only provide a special error message that gets send from the server to the client when it has no HTK installed but then it would also be displayed when the user wants to use a static model (no HTK required). The error message we have now is the only thing that is only displayed when there really is a problem.
And displaying an error / warning in advance for something that might be on purpose is not a good idea in my opinion.