Using the SimpleMRCPClient

LumenVox provides a very useful application called the SimpleMRCPClient to get you quickly started using the Media Server (MRCP) and to act as a sanity check that everything is working as expected after the installation. This can be found here:
https://github.com/lumenvox/mrcp-client

Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) Test Client application.

This can be used for light testing of MRCP requests into the LumenVox MRCP-API server when requesting ASR and TTS operations.

MRCPv1 (RTSP) and MRCPv2 (SIP) connectivity is supported.

Note that this is only distributed in binary form, and is designed for testing purposes only. This utility is not designed for use in production, as unnecessary latency and only basic error checking is in place.

To install the application, you must download and extract the binary, installing it into your /usr/local/bin/ folder as shown here:

curl -L https://github.com/lumenvox/mrcp-client/releases/download/v4.1.2/simple_mrcp_client-4.1.2.tar.gz -o simple_mrcp_client.tar.gz sudo tar -xvzf simple_mrcp_client.tar.gz -C /usr/local/bin/ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/simple_mrcp_client

Or, using a single command:

curl -Lp https://github.com/lumenvox/mrcp-client/releases/download/v4.1.2/simple_mrcp_client-4.1.2.tar.gz | sudo tar -xvzf - -C /usr/local/bin/ && sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/simple_mrcp_client

Note that the application is designed to run on 64-bit Linux systems only, and has been tested on CentOS7, CentOS8, RockyLinux8, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Other operating systems should also work (such as RHEL variants) as there are minimal dependencies. Openssl is required for the optional encryption of traffic

There are many optional parameters available for the test application. To see a list of possible options, simply run the executable without any parameters:

simple_mrcp_client

This will display a list of options, parameters as well as some simple examples

Please note that if you are running this on a machine that is remote from the LumenVox mrcp-api, you may need to permit network (firewall) access and you will need to specify the target (mrcp-api) machine's IP address as well as the local machine's IP address (where the utility resides) so that full connectivity can be established.

If you would like to run the application with a container as opposed to downloading the binary directly, you can use the docker-compose.yaml found at the root of this project. Assuming you have Docker installed, you can start the container from the root of this project with the following command:

docker-compose up -d

This will start a container, simple_mrcp_client, which contains the binary for the application. To enter the container, use the following command:

docker exec -it simple_mrcp_client bash

This will open up a Bash shell from which you can run the application. The application is already on the PATH, so you can run it with the following command:

simple_mrcp_client

Running without any options will bring up a description of how to use the application.

When you are done with the container, you can bring it down with the following command, run from the root of this project:

docker-compose down

The docker-compose.yaml configures several folders to be mounted into the container. To use these folders, you must first create them at the root of the project. The following folders are mapped by default:

• ./grammars
• ./ssml
• ./audio

Once the folders have been created, you can start the container. The folders are mounted to the root folder inside the container (/). The mounts are dynamic, so adding files to those folders in the container will also add them to your local disk, and vice versa.

Please see our mrcp-api project for details of configuring your MRCP server and connecting this to the LumenVox cluster.