Jasper on Raspian Buster Software Installation Guide

I completed this install process on a Raspberry Pi Model 3 B+ using the Raspian Buster Lite ISO. I used a USB microphone and speakers that plug into the audio jack.

I also tested this on a Raspberry Pi Model 4 using Raspian Buster Lite ISO.

This install uses pocketsphinx for the speech to text and festival for text to speech. This means you aren't sharing your audio with any outside services

Burn Raspian Buster image onto SD Card

Boot the Raspian image on your Pi. Sign in to your Pi. Use raspi-config and enable the network adapter or wireless according to your needs. Also, enable SSH. Plug in your microphone and speakers. Restart your Pi.

SSH into your Pi

                    
                        ssh pi@192.168.1.10 # replace this address with the address of your Pi

Run the following commands to update your Pi and install some utilities

                    
                        sudo apt-get update
                        sudo apt-get upgrade
                        sudo apt-get install nano git-core python-dev bison libasound2-dev libportaudio-dev python-pyaudio
                        sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
                        sudo python /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/easy_install.py pip

Create an ALSA configuration file using

                    
                        sudo nano /lib/modprobe.d/jasper.conf

add the following lines to the file

                    
                        # Load USB audio before the internal soundcard
                        options snd_usb_audio index=0
                        options snd_bcm2835 

                        # Make sure the sound cards are ordered the correct way in ALSA
                        options snd slots=snd_usb_audio,snd_bcm2835

Save the file and restart your Pi

                    
                        sudo shutdown -r now

SSH back into your Pi. Test your microphone and speakers. Run alsamixer

                    
                        alsamixer

Press f6 and select usb microphone, Press F4 capture and press up arrow to increase microphone gain

Test your microphone works by recording a message. Run the arecord command, speak a test message, end with ctrl-C

                    
                        arecord test.wav

Play back your recorded message

                    
                        aplay -D hw:1,0 test.wav

Create a .bash_profile

                    
                        nano .bash_profile

And add the following lines into it

                    
                        export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib"
                        source .bashrc

Edit your .bashrc file using the following command. Scroll to the bottom of the file

                    
                        nano .bashrc

And add the following lines at the end of the file

                    
                        LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib"
                        export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
                        PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/lib/
                        export PATH

Sign out of the raspberry pi and ssh back in to have the bash scripts run

After signing back in download the jasper source using the following command

                    
                        git clone https://github.com/jasperproject/jasper-client.git jasper

Download and apply the following patch to the Jasper source

                    
                        wget http://www.kuekes.com/jasper.patch 
                        cd jasper
                        patch -p1 < ../jasper.patch
                        cd ..

Install needed Python libraries

                    
                        sudo pip install --upgrade setuptools
                        sudo pip install -r jasper/client/requirements.txt        #### this takes a while

Create the Jasper profile

                    
                        cd ~/jasper/client
                        python populate.py
                        cd ~

Install PocketSphinx and the utilities we will need

                    
                        sudo apt-get install pocketsphinx python-pocketsphinx pocketsphinx-en-us
                        sudo apt-get install subversion autoconf libtool automake gfortran g++

Install CMUSphinx

                    
                        svn co https://svn.code.sf.net/p/cmusphinx/code/trunk/cmuclmtk/

                        cd cmuclmtk/
                        ./autogen.sh
                        make
                        sudo make install

                        cd ~

Installing Phonetisaurus, m2m-aligner and MITLM
To use the Pocketsphinx STT engine, you also need to install MIT Language Modeling Toolkit, m2m-aligner and Phonetisaurus (and thus OpenFST)

                    
                        wget http://distfiles.macports.org/openfst/openfst-1.3.4.tar.gz
                        wget https://github.com/mitlm/mitlm/releases/download/v0.4.1/mitlm_0.4.1.tar.gz
                        wget https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/m2m-aligner/m2m-aligner-1.2.tar.gz
                        wget https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/phonetisaurus/is2013-conversion.tgz

                        tar -xvf m2m-aligner-1.2.tar.gz
                        tar -xvf openfst-1.3.4.tar.gz
                        tar -xvf is2013-conversion.tgz
                        tar -xvf mitlm_0.4.1.tar.gz

Patch and build OpenFST.

                    
                        wget http://www.kuekes.com/openfst.patch
                        cd openfst-1.3.4/
                        patch -p 1 < ../openfst.patch
                        sudo ./configure --enable-compact-fsts --enable-const-fsts --enable-far --enable-lookahead-fsts --enable-pdt
                        sudo make install # come back after a really long time *** you will get a bunch of gcc warnings, but it is ok, let them go
                        cd ~

Build m2m-aligner

                    
                        cd m2m-aligner-1.2/
                        sudo make
                        cd ~

Build mitlm

                    
                        cd mitlm-0.4.1/
                        sudo ./configure
                        sudo make install
                        cd ~

Build Phonetisaurus

                    
                        cd is2013-conversion/phonetisaurus/src
                        sudo make
                        cd ~

Copy some files around

                    
                        sudo cp ~/m2m-aligner-1.2/m2m-aligner /usr/local/bin/m2m-aligner
                        sudo cp ~/is2013-conversion/bin/phonetisaurus-g2p /usr/local/bin/phonetisaurus-g2p

Download and build the Phonetisaurus FST model

                    
                        wget https://www.dropbox.com/s/kfht75czdwucni1/g014b2b.tgz
                        tar -xvf g014b2b.tgz

                        cd g014b2b/
                        ./compile-fst.sh
                        cd ..

Rename the folder for convienience

                    
                        mv ~/g014b2b ~/phonetisaurus

Install Festival for TTS

                    
                        sudo apt-get install festival festvox-don

Edit the Jasper profile.yml

                    
                        cd .jasper
                        vi profile.yml

Change the profile to this. I put in x's and 1's for the private information. It should already be set to your private information from before. Specifically the lines under the pocketsphinx: and add the tts_engine: line

                    
                        carrier: vtext.com
                        first_name: xxxxx
                        gmail_address: xxxx@gmail.com
                        gmail_password: xxxx
                        last_name: xxxxx
                        phone_number: '1111111111'
                        prefers_email: false
                        stt_engine: sphinx
                        timezone: America/New_York
                        pocketsphinx:
                            hmm_dir: '/usr/share/pocketsphinx/model/en-us/en-us'
                            fst_model: '../phonetisaurus/g014b2b.fst'
                        tts_engine: festival-tts

Reboot your Pi

                    
                        sudo shutdown -r now

SSH into your pi and start Jasper

                    
                        cd jasper
                        ./jasper.py