Can I use OpenEars (or other) to listen to & analyze speech from the Apple Watch microphone?

Question

Is it possible to use OpenEars (or other package) to access speech from the Apple Watch's microphone?

I wish to build an app that is able to listen to speech, using the watch's microphone, and spots specific keywords.

Answer 1

As of WatchOS 2.1, and iOS 9, I have been able to what you propose, in 2 different ways:

OPTION 1 - RECORD WAV FILE AND UPLOAD TO ASR SERVER I recorded and saved a WAV file to the apple watch. After that I uploaded the file to a paid Speech Recognition provider and everything worked fine! Here is the code to record, replace the UI updating lines of code (and the debug ones) with your own:

//RECORD AUDIO SAMPLE
    var saveUrl: NSURL? //this var is initialized in the awakeWithContext method//
    func recordAudio(){
        let duration = NSTimeInterval(5)
        let recordOptions =
        [WKAudioRecorderControllerOptionsMaximumDurationKey : duration]
       // print("Recording to: "+(saveUrl?.description)!)
        //CONSTRUCT AUDIO FILE URL
        let fileManager = NSFileManager.defaultManager()
        let container = fileManager.containerURLForSecurityApplicationGroupIdentifier("group.artivoice.applewatch");
        let fileName = "audio.wav"
        saveUrl = container?.URLByAppendingPathComponent(fileName)
        presentAudioRecorderControllerWithOutputURL(saveUrl!,
            preset: .WideBandSpeech,
            options: recordOptions,
            completion: { saved, error in
                if let err = error {
                    print(err.description)
                    self.sendMessageToPhone("Recording error: "+err.description)
                }
                if saved {
                    self.btnPlay.setEnabled(true)
                    self.sendMessageToPhone("Audio was saved successfully.")
                    print("Audio Saved")
                    self.uploadAudioSample()
                }
        })
    }

OPTION 2 - USE THE iWATCH's NATIVE SPEECH RECOGNITION In this approach I take the original, native voice menu, but...! I don't add any button options, just pure ASR. I launched the empty voice menu, and then recover the string returned by the ASR. Here's the code, enjoy:

func launchIWatchVoiceRecognition(){
     //you can see the empty array [], add options if it suits you well
        self.presentTextInputControllerWithSuggestions([], allowedInputMode: WKTextInputMode.Plain, completion:{(results) -> Void in
            let aResult = results?[0] as? String
            if(!(aResult == nil)){
                print(aResult) //print result
                self.sendMessageToPhone("Native ASR says:  "+aResult!)
                dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue()) {
                    self.txtWatch.setText(aResult) //show result on UI
                }
            }//end if
        })//end show voice menu
    }

OPTION 2 is lightning fast, but OPTION 1 can be more handy if you want to do some advanced speech recon functions (custom vocabularies, grammar...) I would recommend OPTION 1 for most users. Voila!! If you need extra hints let me know!