I have an RPI running Sphinx. It's OK, not great. The biggest issue I have is that you have to pre-define commands.
Your own custom software based on Sphinx?
Is it PocketSphinx?
I was mostly interested in automated transcription, didn't look much at the live recognition stuff.
It was pocketsphinx. Automated transcription would probably be pretty sad.
I think the non-pocket version (Sphinx4) should be more capable, no?
Just the other day I was looking at CMU's Sphinx project for speech recognition. It seems quite capable, even of building something like this Google thing, but I haven't tried to actually use it.
Large-vocabulary recognition probably needs something better than a Raspberry Pi... so, just use a more powerful CPU.
Yes, Google has an incomprehensibly enormous database of proprietary knowledge and information. Good for them! If we want to build a home assistant that doesn't depend on Google, we'll have to make tradeoffs. That doesn't mean it has to suck.