Cant find module even though its installed and can run

Question

I've looked into Python's speech recognition and it's working great so far. It offers a wide range of software, but I'll be using CMUSphinx, since it works offline. CMUSphinx is installed and working correctly when started through their own program cmupshinx_continous. But when trying to write my own Python-script, it cannot find the module speech_recognition. This is odd because when I run:

python -m speech_recognition

it works perfectly fine. But when I start my script:

import speech_recognition as sr

    # obtain audio from the microphone
    r = sr.Recognizer()
    with sr.Microphone() as source:
        print("Say something!")
        audio = r.listen(source)

    # recognize speech using Sphinx
    try:
        print("Sphinx thinks you said " + r.recognize_sphinx(audio))
    except sr.UnknownValueError:
        print("Sphinx could not understand audio")
    except sr.RequestError as e:
        print("Sphinx error; {0}".format(e))

I get the error message that the module: speech_recognition cannot be found. When using

pip install SpeechRecognition

I first used sudo pip install but when it didn't work I thought it might have been because I installed it in root. So I uninstalled it and used pip install --user SpeechRecognition instead to no avail. I also tried adding something with PYTHONPATH, but I have no idea what I tried to do.

So right now I'm very stuck. Please keep in mind that I'm incredibly new to both Linux and Python.

Any ideas on what I can try?

Answer 1

Almost always when you can access a module from one point but not another (think of script/program, terminal/editor, ...) you have multiple python versions and only installed the module in one of them.

In your case IDLE uses a different python version than you on the terminal. You have multiple possibilities:

• configure IDLE to use the version you use on the terminal
• use the version that IDLE uses (and install all modules again)
• don't use IDLE to run your scripts, instead use python myscript.py

You mentioned that IDLE is python3, normally in the terminal python is python2. You can try python --version to show which version of python you use. python3 might be the python you use in IDLE, the pip would probably be pip3.

Because the library does support python3 I would advise to use python3 instead of python2.

IDLE unfortunately isn't that great of an editor, I recommend something else like notepad++, pycharm, vim or emacs.