Why does PocketSphinx Android demo require cygwin

Question

I am trying to develop a speech recognition program in android and so far I have seen that themost popular option seems to be CMU sphinx, with pocketsphinx being used for an

Answer 1

Is it possible to do this without having to install cygwin and Eclipse, by just using the Android SDK that I use to write all my programs?

Yes, it's perfectly possible with the latest version. Development has never been easier, you can just checkout project with subversion from here:

https://svn.code.sf.net/p/cmusphinx/code/trunk cmusphinx-code

Subversion plugin is part of the Eclipse.

Once you checkout the project, you can just build it for your device and it will work. A good updated manual for this will be released soon on the website (wait for 2 weeks).

What exactly do I need cygwin and eclipse for?

Eclipse is the IDE to give you access to SDK features through the graphical user interface.

You do not need Cygwin, this is a misconception of the author of the blog post.

For old version you also need NDK which is used to compile native code into binary. Pocketsphinx uses native code for more efficient decoding with a limited resources of mobile system.

Can't I do whatever eclipse is supposed to do in that tutorial, using the Android SDK?

You can.