Yearly Archives: 2020


Ubuntu 18.04 and VOSK Speech Recognition API

Just some quick notes on how to install and use VOSK on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

  1. Install using: pip3 install vosk
  2. Get samples from https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api/tree/master/python/example
  3. Using ffmpeg create input audio files ffmpeg -i video.mkv -c:a pcm_s16le -ac 1 output.wav
    It will create a file of the following type output.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 48000 Hz
  4. Export text to JSON python3 ./test_simple.py output.wav


Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=smtp.gmail.com type=AAAA: Host not found, try again

Recently, a postfix mail server running on Ubuntu gave us the following error while trying to send an email to Bob:

Jun 16 17:02:03 gateway postfix/smtp[23522]: ED3799A0D27: to=[email protected], relay=none, delay=0.02, delays=0.01/0.01/0/0, dsn=4.4.3, status=deferred (Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=smtp.gmail.com type=AAAA: Host not found, try again)

After several attempts like changing the protocol (inet_protocols) to IPv4 (since AAAA is an IPv6 A-record) in /etc/postfix/main.cf and so on we could not get it running.. We restored the configuration file to its original and then we restarted the service:

sudo service postfix restart;

It worked!…. no idea why..