After much work, I finally got Microsoft.SpeechRecognitionEngine to accept a WAVE audio stream. Here's the process:
On the Pi, I have ffmpeg running. I stream the audio using this command
ffmpeg -ac 1 -f alsa -i hw:1,0 -ar 16000 -acodec pcm_s16le -f rtp rtp://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:1234
On the the server side, I create a UDPClient and listen on port 1234. I receive the packets on a separate thread. First, I strip off the RTP header (header format explained here) and write the payload to a special stream. I had to use the SpeechStreamer class described in Sean's response in order for the SpeechRecognitionEngine to work. It wasn't working with a standard Memory Stream.
The only thing I had to do on the speech recognition side set the input to the audio stream instead of the default audio device.
recognizer.SetInputToAudioStream( rtpClient.AudioStream,
new SpeechAudioFormatInfo(WAVFile.SAMPLE_RATE, AudioBitsPerSample.Sixteen, AudioChannel.Mono));
I haven't done extensive testing on it (i.e. letting it stream for days and seeing if it still works), but I'm able to save off the audio sample in the SpeechRecognized and it sounds great. I'm using a sample rate of 16 KHz. I might bump it down to 8 KHz to reduce the amount of data transfer, but I will worry about that once it becomes a problem.
I should also mention, the response is extremely fast. I can speak an entire sentence and get a response in less than a second. The RTP connection seems to add very little overhead to the process. I'll have to try a benchmark and compare it with just using MIC input.
EDIT: Here is my RTPClient class.
/// <summary>
/// Connects to an RTP stream and listens for data
/// </summary>
public class RTPClient
{
private const int AUDIO_BUFFER_SIZE = 65536;
private UdpClient client;
private IPEndPoint endPoint;
private SpeechStreamer audioStream;
private bool writeHeaderToConsole = false;
private bool listening = false;
private int port;
private Thread listenerThread;
/// <summary>
/// Returns a reference to the audio stream
/// </summary>
public SpeechStreamer AudioStream
{
get { return audioStream; }
}
/// <summary>
/// Gets whether the client is listening for packets
/// </summary>
public bool Listening
{
get { return listening; }
}
/// <summary>
/// Gets the port the RTP client is listening on
/// </summary>
public int Port
{
get { return port; }
}
/// <summary>
/// RTP Client for receiving an RTP stream containing a WAVE audio stream
/// </summary>
/// <param name="port">The port to listen on</param>
public RTPClient(int port)
{
Console.WriteLine(" [RTPClient] Loading...");
this.port = port;
// Initialize the audio stream that will hold the data
audioStream = new SpeechStreamer(AUDIO_BUFFER_SIZE);
Console.WriteLine(" Done");
}
/// <summary>
/// Creates a connection to the RTP stream
/// </summary>
public void StartClient()
{
// Create new UDP client. The IP end point tells us which IP is sending the data
client = new UdpClient(port);
endPoint = new IPEndPoint(IPAddress.Any, port);
listening = true;
listenerThread = new Thread(ReceiveCallback);
listenerThread.Start();
Console.WriteLine(" [RTPClient] Listening for packets on port " + port + "...");
}
/// <summary>
/// Tells the UDP client to stop listening for packets.
/// </summary>
public void StopClient()
{
// Set the boolean to false to stop the asynchronous packet receiving
listening = false;
Console.WriteLine(" [RTPClient] Stopped listening on port " + port);
}
/// <summary>
/// Handles the receiving of UDP packets from the RTP stream
/// </summary>
/// <param name="ar">Contains packet data</param>
private void ReceiveCallback()
{
// Begin looking for the next packet
while (listening)
{
// Receive packet
byte[] packet = client.Receive(ref endPoint);
// Decode the header of the packet
int version = GetRTPHeaderValue(packet, 0, 1);
int padding = GetRTPHeaderValue(packet, 2, 2);
int extension = GetRTPHeaderValue(packet, 3, 3);
int csrcCount = GetRTPHeaderValue(packet, 4, 7);
int marker = GetRTPHeaderValue(packet, 8, 8);
int payloadType = GetRTPHeaderValue(packet, 9, 15);
int sequenceNum = GetRTPHeaderValue(packet, 16, 31);
int timestamp = GetRTPHeaderValue(packet, 32, 63);
int ssrcId = GetRTPHeaderValue(packet, 64, 95);
if (writeHeaderToConsole)
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} {6} {7} {8}",
version,
padding,
extension,
csrcCount,
marker,
payloadType,
sequenceNum,
timestamp,
ssrcId);
}
// Write the packet to the audio stream
audioStream.Write(packet, 12, packet.Length - 12);
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Grabs a value from the RTP header in Big-Endian format
/// </summary>
/// <param name="packet">The RTP packet</param>
/// <param name="startBit">Start bit of the data value</param>
/// <param name="endBit">End bit of the data value</param>
/// <returns>The value</returns>
private int GetRTPHeaderValue(byte[] packet, int startBit, int endBit)
{
int result = 0;
// Number of bits in value
int length = endBit - startBit + 1;
// Values in RTP header are big endian, so need to do these conversions
for (int i = startBit; i <= endBit; i++)
{
int byteIndex = i / 8;
int bitShift = 7 - (i % 8);
result += ((packet[byteIndex] >> bitShift) & 1) * (int)Math.Pow(2, length - i + startBit - 1);
}
return result;
}
}
