Real-time Speech Recognition with Vosk and Zig

This project implements a minimal real-time speech-to-text application using Vosk and Zig.

Audio Device Configuration

The application uses ALSA's default device, which is configured in alsa.conf. To use a different audio device:

1. Find your audio devices: aplay -l or arecord -l
2. Edit alsa.conf and update the pcm.!default section:

   pcm.!default {
       type hw
       card 3      # Change to your card number
       device 0    # Change to your device number
   }
   

3. Rebuild and run the application

Prerequisites

• Zig 0.15.1 (configured via mise)
• Nix development environment configured for ALSA, and audio libraries
• patchelf (for fixing RPATH in release builds): nix-env -iA nixpkgs.patchelf

Vosk Model Download

The application uses the Vosk small English model for speech recognition:

• Source: https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models/vosk-model-small-en-us-0.15.zip
• Size: ~50MB
• Language: English only
• Accuracy: Good for simple sentences and commands

Installation Steps

1. Enter nix development environment: nix develop
2. Build application: zig build
3. Run: zig build run

Release Builds and Portability

When building in release mode (-Doptimize=ReleaseSafe), Zig embeds the full path to libvosk.so in the ELF NEEDED entries, making the binary non-portable. The build system automatically fixes this by running fix_needed.sh which uses patchelf to replace the full path with just the library name.

Automatic fix: Just run zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe - the NEEDED entries are fixed automatically.

Manual fix: If needed, you can run ./fix_needed.sh [binary_path] [library_name] manually.

The script uses patchelf (via nix-shell if not installed) to replace entries like:

• Before: NEEDED: [/home/user/.cache/zig/.../libvosk.so]
• After: NEEDED: [libvosk.so]

This makes the binary portable while using the existing RPATH ($ORIGIN/../lib) to find the library at runtime.

Usage

The application will:

• Initialize audio capture from default microphone
• Load the Vosk speech recognition model
• Process audio in real-time
• Output recognized text to terminal
• Exit on Ctrl+C

Dependencies

• Vosk C API library
• ALSA for audio capture

Notes

Vosk tends to recognize "light" as lake or like