Environment setup

We will create an environment for Next-gen Kaldi that runs on CPU in this tutorial.

Note

Since the yesno dataset used in this tutorial is very tiny, training on CPU works very well for it.

If your dataset is very large, e.g., hundreds or thousands of hours of training data, please follow Installation to install icefall that works with GPU.

Create a virtual environment

virtualenv -p python3 /tmp/icefall_env

The above command creates a virtual environment in the directory /tmp/icefall_env. You can select any directory you want.

The output of the above command is given below:

Already using interpreter /usr/bin/python3
Using base prefix '/usr'
New python executable in /tmp/icefall_env/bin/python3
Also creating executable in /tmp/icefall_env/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pkg_resources, pip, wheel...done.

Now we can activate the environment using:

source /tmp/icefall_env/bin/activate

Install dependencies

Warning

Remeber to activate your virtual environment before you continue!

After activating the virtual environment, we can use the following command to install dependencies of icefall:

Hint

Remeber that we will run this tutorial on CPU, so we install dependencies required only by running on CPU.

# Caution: Installation order matters!

# We use torch 2.0.0 and torchaduio 2.0.0 in this tutorial.
# Other versions should also work.

pip install torch==2.0.0+cpu torchaudio==2.0.0+cpu -f https://download.pytorch.org/whl/torch_stable.html

# If you are using macOS or Windows, please use the following command to install torch and torchaudio
# pip install torch==2.0.0 torchaudio==2.0.0 -f https://download.pytorch.org/whl/torch_stable.html

# Now install k2
# Please refer to https://k2-fsa.github.io/k2/installation/from_wheels.html#linux-cpu-example

pip install k2==1.24.3.dev20230726+cpu.torch2.0.0 -f https://k2-fsa.github.io/k2/cpu.html

# Install the latest version of lhotse

pip install git+https://github.com/lhotse-speech/lhotse

Install icefall

We will put the source code of icefall into the directory /tmp You can select any directory you want.

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/k2-fsa/icefall
cd icefall
pip install -r ./requirements.txt

# Anytime we want to use icefall, we have to set the following
# environment variable

export PYTHONPATH=/tmp/icefall:$PYTHONPATH

Hint

If you get the following error during this tutorial:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'icefall'

please set the above environment variable to fix it.

Congratulations! You have installed icefall successfully.

For the more curious

icefall contains a collection of Python scripts and you don’t need to use python3 setup.py install or pip install icefall to install it. All you need to do is to download the code and set the environment variable PYTHONPATH.