• Support for the Houndify API with recognizer_instance.recognize_houndify (thanks @tb0hdan!).
• recognize_sphinx now supports keyword-based matching via the keywords=[("cat", 30), ("potato", 45)] parameter.
  • The second number in each pair is the sensitivity, which determines how loosely Sphinx will interpret speech to be those keywords - higher numbers mean more false positives, while lower numbers mean a lower detection rate.
  • A new example for keyword matching is now available.
• BREAKING CHANGE: API.AI STT API IS BEING SHUT DOWN SOON. (source)
  • For now, the recognize_api function will keep working if you're on a paid API.AI plan, and we will not be removing it until the service is shut down entirely.
  • It is best to transition to another backend as soon as possible. I recommend Microsoft Bing Voice Recognition or Wit.ai for previous API.AI users.
• phrase_time_limit option for listening functions, to limit phrase lengths to a certain number of seconds.
• Support for operation timeouts with recognizer_instance.operation_timeout - this can be used to ensure long requests always take finite time.
• recognize_ibm now opts out of request logging by default, for improved user privacy (thanks @michellemorales!). This is a breaking change if you previously relied on request logging behaviour.
• Bugfix - listen() sometimes didn't terminate on finite-length streams.
• Bugfix - Microsoft Bing Voice Recognition changed their authentication API endpoint, so that required some small code updates (thanks @tmator!).
• Bugfix - 24-bit audio now works correctly on Python 2.
• Update Wit.ai API version from deprecated version.
• A bunch of documentation updates, fixes, and improvements.