dotnet

Rhino Demos for .NET

This package contains .NET Core command line demos for processing real-time audio (i.e. microphone) and audio files using Rhino Speech-to-Intent engine.

Rhino

Made in Vancouver, Canada by Picovoice

Rhino is Picovoice's Speech-to-Intent engine. It directly infers intent from spoken commands within a given context of interest, in real-time. For example, given a spoken command

Can I have a small double-shot espresso?

Rhino infers that the user wants to order a drink and emits the following inference result:

{
  "isUnderstood": "true",
  "intent": "orderBeverage",
  "slots": {
    "beverage": "espresso",
    "size": "small",
    "numberOfShots": "2"
  }
}

Rhino is:

• using deep neural networks trained in real-world environments.
• compact and computationally-efficient. It is perfect for IoT.
• self-service. Developers can train custom models using Picovoice Console.

Requirements

• .NET 8.0

Compatibility

• Linux (x86_64)
• macOS (x86_64)
• Windows (x86_64)
• Raspberry Pi:
  • 3 (32 and 64 bit)
  • 4 (32 and 64 bit)
  • 5 (32 and 64 bit)

Installation

Both demos use Microsoft's .NET Core framework.

Build with the dotnet CLI:

dotnet build -c MicDemo.Release
dotnet build -c FileDemo.Release

AccessKey

Rhino requires a valid Picovoice AccessKey at initialization. AccessKey acts as your credentials when using Rhino SDKs. You can get your AccessKey for free. Make sure to keep your AccessKey secret. Signup or Login to Picovoice Console to get your AccessKey.

Usage

NOTE: File path arguments must be absolute paths. The working directory for the following dotnet commands is:

rhino/demo/dotnet/RhinoDemo

File Demo

The file demo uses Rhino to get an inference result from an audio file. This demo is mainly useful for quantitative performance benchmarking against a corpus of audio data. Note that only the relevant spoken command should be present in the file and no other speech. There also needs to be at least one second of silence at the end of the file.

dotnet run -c FileDemo.Release -- \
--input_audio_path ${AUDIO_PATH} \
--access_key ${ACCESS_KEY} \
--context_path ${CONTEXT_PATH}

Microphone Demo

The microphone demo opens an audio stream from a microphone and performs inference on spoken commands:

dotnet run -c MicDemo.Release -- \
--access_key ${ACCESS_KEY} \
--context_path ${CONTEXT_PATH}

It is possible that the default audio input device is not the one you wish to use. There are a couple of debugging facilities baked into the demo application to solve this. First, type the following into the console:

dotnet run -c MicDemo.Release -- --show_audio_devices

It provides information about various audio input devices on the box. This is an example of the output:

index: 0, device name: USB Audio Device
index: 1, device name: MacBook Air Microphone

You can use the device index to specify which microphone to use for the demo. For instance, if you want to use the USB Audio Device in the above example, you can invoke the demo application as below:

dotnet run -c MicDemo.Release -- \
--access_key ${ACCESS_KEY} \
--context_path ${CONTEXT_PATH} \
--audio_device_index 0

If the problem persists we suggest storing the recorded audio into a file for inspection. This can be achieved with:

dotnet run -c MicDemo.Release -- \
--access_key ${ACCESS_KEY} \
--context_path ${CONTEXT_PATH} \
--output_path ./test.wav

If after listening to the stored file there is no apparent problem detected, please open an issue.