I personally saw it as the author sharing experiences they found humourous/absurd rather making value judgements. At least, that's the impression I got from the writing style.

I think you may want to re-read the parent comment :)

This issue is resolved in Jessie: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/g...

In my experiences, the issues with building CMU Sphinx are mainly unspecified dependencies, undocumented version requirements, and forgetting to sacrifice the goat when the MSVC redistributable installer pops up.

We've written detailed, up-to-date instructions [1] for installing CMU Sphinx, and now also provide prebuilt binaries [2]!

If you're interested in not sending your audio to Google, CMU Sphinx and other libraries (like Kaldi and Julius), are definitely worth a second look.

[1] https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition/blob/master/refe... [2] https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition/tree/master/thir...

Yeah I'm gonna leave a reply here just in case I need to find this again (already opened tabs, but you never know). This might be big for a stalled project at work. If this can un-stall that, I'll sure owe you a beer ;)

Would you mind submitting this documentation to CMU? I get the feeling they'd love to at least host a link to them or something to enhance their own documentation?

Thanks for providing this. Will definitely give it a fresh look.