Creating Android service for continuous speech recognition

Question

I am trying to create the service which allows to continuously run the Android speech recognition engine. I have seen an example at Android Speech Recognition as a service on Android 4.1 & 4.2, and took it, but somehow i am always getting the SpeechRecognizer.ERROR_NO_MATCH error in the listener onError() method regardless of what is said. Of course, onResults() is never called. The code of the service is exactly as has been shown in the answer linked above, my code to start it is:

Intent startServiceIntent = null;           
Log.d(TAG, "Creating new intent for the recognition service");
startServiceIntent = new Intent(getApplicationContext(), SpeechRecognitionService.class);
Log.d(TAG, "Starting the speech recognition service ...");
getApplicationContext().startService(startServiceIntent);

int duration = Toast.LENGTH_LONG;
CharSequence text = "Starting speech recognition ...";
Toast toast = Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), text, duration);
toast.show();

But when I directly call the speech recognition engine by sending Intent, it works just fine:

Intent intent = new Intent(RecognizerIntent.ACTION_RECOGNIZE_SPEECH);
intent.putExtra(RecognizerIntent.EXTRA_LANGUAGE_MODEL,
                    RecognizerIntent.LANGUAGE_MODEL_FREE_FORM);
intent.putExtra(RecognizerIntent.EXTRA_PROMPT, "Start talking");
intent.putExtra(RecognizerIntent.EXTRA_MAX_RESULTS, 10);
startActivityForResult(intent, 1234);

All my test I am running on Note2 with Android 4.1.2 on it. Has anyone faced this problem and might know how to solve this? Thanks

Try saying one simple word for example hello and see if you still get error. — Hoan Nguyen
If you're really trying to leave this running full-time you're going to find that your battery does not last very long. :) — adamp
I have tried to say just "hello" and got the same result ... What is also strange, that when I commented out the mute of the audio, I did not hear any sound when the system starts recognition ... And of course there were nothing shown on my screen as well — Vadim
I am aware of the battery issue, there are commands to start and to stop the recognition ... BTW, the documentation says the callback will be run on the main thread of the application, so I don't understand whether it possible to run the recognition while the phone is sleeping using wakelock and additional thread? — Vadim

gregm gregm · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-08T17:26:17

Try setting the EXTRA_CALLING_PACKAGE. It doesn't make sense, but I believe it will solve your problem. See the method below. Also check out the code here: https://github.com/gast-lib/gast-lib/blob/master/library/src/root/gast/speech/SpeechRecognizingActivity.java

 public void recognizeDirectly(Intent recognizerIntent)
    {
        // SpeechRecognizer requires EXTRA_CALLING_PACKAGE, so add if it's not
        // here
        if (!recognizerIntent.hasExtra(RecognizerIntent.EXTRA_CALLING_PACKAGE))
        {
            recognizerIntent.putExtra(RecognizerIntent.EXTRA_CALLING_PACKAGE,
                    "com.dummy");
        }
        SpeechRecognizer recognizer = getSpeechRecognizer();
        recognizer.startListening(recognizerIntent);
    }

Creating Android service for continuous speech recognition

1 Answers