For people who want simple, out of the box stuff (not necessarily in Python) for just getting phonemes I can also recommend [0]. Not amazing recognition quality

For people who want simple, out of the box stuff (not necessarily in Python) for just getting phonemes I can also recommend [0]. Not amazing recognition quality, but dead simple setup, and it is possible to integrate a language model as well (I never needed one for my task). The author showed it as well in [1], but kind of skimmed right by - but to me if you want to know speech recognition in detail, pocketsphinx-python is one of the best ways. Customizing the language model is a huge boost in domain specific recognition. Large company APIs will usually be better at generic speaker, generic language recognition - but if you can do speaker adaptation and customize the language model, there are some insane gains possible since you prune out a lot of uncertainty and complexity. If you are more interested in recognition and alignment to a script, "gentle" is great [2][3]. The guts also have raw Kaldi recognition, which is pretty good for a generic speech recognizer but you would need to do some coding to pull out that part on its own. For a decent performing deep model, check into Mozilla's version of Baidu's DeepSpeech [4]. If doing full-on development, my colleague has been using a bridge between PyTorch (for training) and Kaldi (to use their decoders) to good success [5]. [0] how I use pocketsphinx to get phonemes, https://github.com/kastnerkyle/ez-phones https://github.com/kastnerkyle/ez-phones [1] https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx-python https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx-python [2] https://github.com/lowerquality/gentle https://github.com/lowerquality/gentle [3] how I use gentle for foreced alignment, https://github.com/kastnerkyle/raw_voice_cleanup/tree/master/alignment https://github.com/kastnerkyle/raw_voice_cleanup/tree/master... [4] https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech [5] https://github.com/mravanelli/pytorch-kaldi https://github.com/mravanelli/pytorch-kaldi